Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present Christine Kitano’s poem “Disguise” as our first featured chapbook poem of Issue 3: May/June 2024. You can find more of her poetry in her award-winning chapbook from Texas Review Press, Dumb Luck & other poems.
Disguise
When I bought the dress, I envisioned myself
Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, midline
embraced and buckled, spinning through
the Piazza della Rotonda, eating an ice cream
on the Spanish Steps (only the scoop, she discards
the cone), her waist that impossible vanishing
center, the pinprick pupil of an iris, the ink-
dark core of a pink anemone. How I longed
for the ease of that body on screen, the razor-
erect posture ferrying her ballerina figure
from scene to scene. What daughter isn’t taught
to want this, to want to be this
princess in disguise. Of course, the dress never
fit. Even when it zipped, it puckered
around the hips and slumped from my shoulders
like loose bandaging. But I bought it,
imagining I’d one day be the type of person
to wear it, a person it might have been designed to fit.
If I didn’t see your face, I would have thought
you were a white girl, my mother says
when she pulls in to pick me up at LAX,
and she’s grinning, it’s a compliment. She’s filled
my childhood bedroom closet with dresses
from the thrift store, old prom
and bridesmaid gowns in garish colors,
each smelling of stale perfume, sweat,
baby powder, and disinfectant. She slides
one off a hanger and hands it to me—it’s
magenta, a slinky material that writhes
in my fists like an animal. She begs me to try
it on; despite knowing what this will lead to
I relent, pull the cold satin to my shoulders,
brace for that sharp intake of breath then
the zipper’s whine as she eases it, urging
me to suck it in, be thinner, be prettier, be
like a white girl, pleading to a power
that is beyond me but I do what I can
to obey, stand stick still in the dread
blank space before the fabric rips,
the metal teeth seize, a force gives up
its claim and the body—my body—
defiantly reassumes its shape.
(This poem was first published by Quire.)
About the Poem
I began with the image of the dress like “loose bandaging” from dialogue I heard in passing on a TV show about someone’s outfit looking like an ace bandage. I was taken with the image, the idea of clothing being a dressing, the body being a wound, etc. Then, I was watching Roman Holiday and marveling at Audrey Hepburn moving across the screen. These two images formed the foundation of the poem. I give thanks to C. Mikal Oness at Quire for offering a few key edits, and to Chris Buckley for reprinting the poem in SALT.
Christine Kitano
Author Bio
Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is coeditor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University and also serves on the poetry faculty for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
From Dumb Luck & other poems
Christine Kitano’s Dumb Luck & other poems offers a portrait of a thirty-something Asian American woman who finds herself living in the relative safety of upstate New York before and during the pandemic. In one poem the speaker reflects on current events (the ongoing pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, the surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S.) and contrasts these with the peace of rural New York, wondering, “Is this / the reward for good luck, just a more / comfortable survival?” The poems in this collection orbit around this question, providing both lyric and narrative explorations on luck, guilt, and survival. Ultimately, these poems delve into how the otherwise mundane questions of selfhood and identity for a gendered and racialized body take on greater urgency during times of increased social unrest, panic, and violence.
Contents