Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a Bread Loaf Conference, Kenyon Review Winter Workshop and Tin House Winter Workshop alumni. She has work published/forthcoming in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, AGNI, Salt Hill, OSU The Journal, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection, Burn After Dawn, is published with Landmark Books. She has two poetry chapbooks, Bodies of Separation and The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, published with Cathexis Northwest Press and Mouthfeel Press respectively. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com

1 See this three-point lighting with halogen and only one image of the woman. Still in a frame, trapped
in time in a chroma key, divorced from her shadow. Sometimes, I think the poison we release has a
way of returning to us. Sometimes, it returns as gravity, the woman on the floor clasped between linen
sheets. Sometimes, it returns as salt on the earth. Sometimes, as a tired cliche.

2 Sometimes, I think of swallowtails. How many have watched death pass through them like hunger
through their bones. In the face of an oncoming car, the deer in the headlights was at once dead and
alive. Like Schrödinger in a cinematic revival. In Thief of Bagdad, the actress looked directly into the
floodlights, and I thought about spreading tenderness over the earth, fanning white ash from the
actress’ décolletage.

3 See the wind, it always returns to take us. 1927, in the glow of the Chinese theatre, folded as a protest beneath old San Francisco tower. 1929, in Piccadilly, with the barrel of ambition, an exit wound
through turpentine sky. 1934, impaled by a knife, borne of our own volition. Maybe the only endings
written were the ones we learnt to forgive ourselves for.

4 Butterflies can’t live through an eternal winter. In 1934, when the heat was immaterial, she lost every
role that mattered that year. In Thief of Baghdad, when she slaved in greasepaint and a bandeau, the
lights exuded a passion on her body, her organs going up in smoke. An iris expanded in the eye of a
camera—it captured a woman, cast in a series of yellow indictments, her hands besmirched with coal.

5 Madame Butterfly, are you tired of your performance? Are you tired of hyperbole? We begin the
sentence “That woman...” and it ends with an imperative of expectation.

6 When the swallowtail passes from a thousand paper cuts, it learns that nothing is as permanent as
impermanence.

7 How many swallowtails have died in the garden? When she crossed white lovers for the small screen
then retreated into Moongate, winter passed through her like ailments through the body, each role left
her even less desired than the last. In the last flight of the swallowtail, there were bodies of colour we’d
known about, wings in our hands, even before we’d known what Fairbanks had allowed to die.

8 And star in the snow, in the only way tendered by the history, she found a way to inherit something as
unholy as the weather.

Volume 16.2, summer 26

Sher ting

The trail of a butterfly

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           "I think I left America because I died so often." — Anna May Wong