Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Barbie Chang Should Have Seen
Barbie Chang should have seen
xxxxx the signs should
have noticed the signs in the street
that were backwards
that were in a different language
should have noticed
the people hiding behind trees in front
of her mother’s house
her mother catching her breath after
a shower little pieces of
death that fell off of her like dust
for two years the car
never moved then her body hardly
moved out of the bed
death is fragmented is not a noun but
a verb its movements
are invisible Barbie Chang visited each
day with her wagon of
food guns ready to shoot the dragons
under the bed to shoot
the dementia out of her father’s head
she should have
seen the signs but was busy tending to
her children sleeping
with both eyes closed she was tired of
her mother tired of her
anger toward her father tired of her
father’s weather
his errors tired of their errands tired
of her lungs and their
refusal to open why do we kill flowers
for a funeral when there
is already so much death fifty people
came all the people
who never visited who never saw her
fill canisters with air
the hospice notebook said 7:14 can’t
breathe_ then 7:34 last
breath Barbie Chang never saw her take
her second-to-last breath
never saw her wait twenty seconds wait
for Barbie Chang to come
see her wait for Barbie Chang to punch
holes in her lungs
Barbie Chang couldn’t find the hole puncher
wanted to punch herself for
not singing to her for not medicating her
father for not believing her
mother about her father for not combining
the word death with an
object for thinking death is something
within itself something
containable like an eyeball is it better
for leaves to stay on
or fall off where were all the people where
was Barbie Chang when she
took one more breath when she blew
out her last wrath
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s most recent poetry collections are Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming 2026) and With My Back to the World (FSG, 2024). The latter was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and won the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was longlisted for the National Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Chang has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com. (updated 4/2026)