In my dreams, I eat my mother whole.
She is a difficult woman to swallow—but we share that too. This is how I explore the generational trauma of assimilation and motherhood: through the lens of food, the second most universal commonality after language itself. For the past two years, I’ve been working on Chicken Feet, a play about consumption of both the personal and political.
How much of ourselves can we cannibalize in order to be more palatable?
I had the opportunity to tell Chicken Feet in a different form (live poetry!) last night at Heauxdega, a studio space DTLA. Prior to my reading, I asked the audience to engage with the story through not only sound, but taste as well. As I shared the premise of Chicken Feet, the audience ate popular Asian snacks and mused on their own relationships with family and food.
The poem I wrote, titled “Gut Feeling”, was a writing exercise that lives alongside to Chicken Feet. Thank you to my friend, Halleta, for hosting the event, Josh Liu for the hairstyling and continued support of queer art, and of course, everyone who attended and listened. I’ll remember every face from my first ever workshop of this story.
Below is the poem in full:
Gut Feeling by Sara Li
In my dreams, I eat my mother whole. From head to toe, tissue to bone, We reunite in the same body once more. She is a difficult woman to swallow, but we share that too. In our native tongue, to say hunger is to say, ‘my stomach aches.’ 我的肚子餓了 We also say, 我的肚子疼 The stomach hurts. Which is also to say— The more we want, the more it will betray us. I have always had this gut feeling. That I am a sick person. And maybe the I in ill is me, Because everything I love, is bad for me. I am a person who gorges And everything I touch, I want to keep inside of me. This type of hoarding, I learned from my grandmothers. And I remember every body that’s laid next to me, So I know it’s always best to leave, Before the good goes sour. Some time ago, I made a lover out of my gluttony— And like all things sweet, it leaves a rot where my instinct should be. The reality is, I have cared for nothing in moderation and moderation does not care for me. Ask me about myself and I will say: I am a mouthful. I am a fistful of wrongs. I am only spitting out what has been said to me. And I have this feeling that No matter how old I get, I’ll never know what’s best for me. Before childhood came to an end, I hated the color yellow. The color of yolk, the hue of my skin. I wanted to peel it off of me like an melon And offer to anyone with teeth— Maybe I’d tell them something like, Love me, take me, I promise I’m good inside. But then I’d slip right through the hand. This is what happens when you cannibalize Everything that you might have been. Last year, I told a girl I loved that My carnal sin was never the wanting, It was merely the wasting. Because when I look back, I just see the chewed up bones Of the parts that I left behind. I let a wishbone grow where my spine should have been. Ask me how, And I’ll say it used to be easy. Now I admit, I have this bad habit, Of keeping everything inside of me. I guess I only like these feelings when it’s going down. But the fact is, My body is a burial ground of selves that I could have, would have, maybe should have been. And sometimes I ask shamefully— How much of myself can I chew off, Before it becomes another form of murder? This past year, I tried my hand at the art of abstaining. Not reaching for the things that tempt me. Not returning to the places that haunt me. I am trying not to feed into this idea That I have to stomach everything that’s in front of me. And what I can say about that is this— This will all come back up someday.
How gorgeous. And heartbreaking. Thank you. 👏