Ally Ang is a gaysian poet based in Boston. Ally’s work has appeared in Nepantla, Tinderbox Poetry Journey, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram or Twitter @TheOceanIsGay, or at allysonang.com.
"Everyone deserves to see themselves and their experiences represented somewhere."
A Vegetarian Goes to H Mart
by: Ally Ang
to finger the refrigerated meats. something about forbidden
fruit, how the flesh gives beneath my fingertips,
makes me lick my lips with pleasure. my gorge rises
as I imagine tearing into the muscle & sinew
of raw pork belly, sucking the juice off the bone, bursting
with carnality. I grit my teeth through the revulsion
because one can never truly shed animal instinct.
in the seafood aisle, my lungs fill with the stench
of fish, a potpourri of fresh death. I don’t turn away
from the milky eyes & viscous tentacles
of a neatly-packaged octopus because my people
aren’t afraid to look death in the face. we eat our fish
with the heads still on & pick the bones out of our teeth
at the dinner table. some call it impolite, but I call it
lack of pretense. a thousand vacant eyes
look back at me, open-mouthed as if to say
someday, you too will be gutted.
until then, I feast.
TS: Tell me about your first exposure to poetry.
AA: I’ve always been into poetry. Even when I was very young, one of my mom’s friends gave me poetry for kids books and that was my first entry. In school I would be really into Sylvia Plath and T.S. Elliot, they were my favorite. But when I got to college, I started exploring more contemporary poetry written by queer poets of college and it showed me that my experiences and experiences of people who look like me are still legitimate experiences to write poetry about. That was eye opening for me and that was when I started taking writing more seriously.
TS: Can you tell me about your journey through poetry, what content you deal with, what forms have you explored?
AA: I’ve been writing for many years but I don’t think I was any good at it until I got to college. I never really studied poetry in any formal way, I just read a lot. I would try my hand at imitating style and form from what I read. When I first started writing, I used it as a way to work through a lot of the issues I had around my identity, my family and things that I didn’t feel comfortable talking about with people. It was a really healing way for me to sort through a lot of stuff I hadn’t processed. Then I moved on from that because I feel like I’ve processed enough, so now I’m interested in pushing myself more in terms of form and content. Lately I’ve been mostly interested in writing about joy, happiness and love. I think queer artists of color are expected to perform pain and trauma through our art. There’s value to that and it has its place for sure, but we’re three dimensional and we have other things to us. I’m trying to celebrate joy in my work lately because I think it has just as much value. I am going to go for my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Washington starting in the fall. That will be the first time I’ll be learning poetry in a formal academic setting and I’m sure that will push me and challenge me in new ways with my writing so I’m looking forward to seeing what that holds for my work.
TS: What have been your influences?
AA: When I started writing it was a lot about my identities as a mixed race Asian American person, a queer person and the intersection of those identities. And also my family. Those were big influences for me at the beginning and they still are, those things are always present in my work even if it doesn’t happen explicitly. A lot of contemporary queer poets of color have had a big influence on me like Franny Choi, she’s one of my biggest influences because she was the first Asian American queer poet I read. She holds a special place in my heart. Also Danez Smith, Ocean Vong. There are a lot of really dope writers doing really important work right now. I feel like a lot of people talk about how this generation doesn’t read enough but I think we’re really in a golden age of poetry because it’s becoming more accessible to lots of different kinds of people because of the internet and social media. It’s no longer a white man’s game. I feel very lucky to be writing in this particular time.
TS: How has your poetry changed from before to after coming out?
AA: That’s a great question. I don’t know if coming out really marked a significant shift for me in my writing. I officially came out at queer when I was 18, then came out as non-binary a couple of years after that. I’m never done coming out, when I meet a new person I have to come out to them all over again. I’m always coming out, so I don’t even know if there is an “after coming out”. Before I came out, I was repressing myself and that came out in my work. It felt inauthentic because I was repressing such an important part of myself that I wasn’t ready to deal with yet. I think my work now is a lot more honest. I have also found a lot of my queer community through writing which is amazing.
TS: What challenges have you faced as a queer POC writer?
AA: One challenge that I faced kind of recently was when I was applying for these MFA programs. I really didn’t know what to include in my writing sample. I didn’t know how honest to be with these graduate school admissions committees about who I am. Because a lot of my writing is deeply personal, it’s about my identity as a queer person of color and I didn’t know if it would work against me to add that in my writing sample. I told myself I would just do it because if this program doesn’t want to see that part of me then it’s probably not the program for me anyway. It worked out in my favor but that’s always something that is difficult to navigate.
Also, my dad’s from Indonesia so I’m of Indonesian descent. I was asked to perform at this Indonesian cultural event in a couple of weeks. I was really jazzed about it but again I didn’t know what kinds of things to read. The Indonesian community is generally, not always, a little more conservative and religious. I didn’t know how much of myself I should bring to this. I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll be reading at this particular event. It’s a lot of navigating how much of myself to bring to different spaces. But I’m lucky to have a lot of spaces where I feel like I can be my full self in my writing and just as a person.
TS: Can you talk about the power of reclaiming space and how you do that with your writing?
AA: The literary world has traditionally been very white male dominated and inaccessible in a lot of ways. I meet a lot people where I tell them I write poetry and they’re like “I don’t get your poetry” and I tell them that maybe they’ve been reading the wrong poetry. There are people writing to all sorts of different experiences, all sorts of styles and you’ll find someone whose poetry you can connect with. Now, we’re in a really powerful moment where a lot of people with marginalized identities are taking up more space in this world and getting a platform to present their stories in a realm where their stories have not been traditionally represented. When I was a little 18 year old, newly out and queer in the world, trying to figure out who I am and where I belonged, reading poetry from other queer poets, queer asian poets specifically, was formative for me. I grew up in a very white straight town in CT so I felt isolated a lot of the time and reading poetry by people who can relate to some of my experiences made me feel a lot less alone. It’s so important to have that. Everyone deserves to see themselves and their experiences represented somewhere. Reclaiming space can look like a lot of different things. I think it’s very powerful to reclaim physical space, being at open mics and slams and being able to get on the mic to speak your truth is very powerful. You also reclaim space by putting your narrative out into the world.
TS: Do you consider yourself an activist and how does this shine through in your writing?
AA: No, because I’m not really that involved in organizing work. I feel like calling myself an activist would be giving myself too much credit. I definitely approach my life and poetry through a social justice lens and I feel like if I’m not addressing issues of oppression and injustice in my art then it’s really pointless. I’m deeply inspired by activists and the knowledge that I’ve learned from them has informed the work that I do.
TS: How have you healed through writing?
AA: I came into writing from a place of isolation and not really feeling like I had a community, or knowing where I fit in. I didn’t feel like I could talk about my experiences. When I was first able to put voice to those feelings in my writing, it was very powerful for me on my personal healing journey. I would not be as comfortable with myself and confident in who I am if I hadn’t started writing when I was a teenager because writing was the first space in which I was able to work through a lot of the difficult things i was experiencing. Like I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a very straight white community and I didn’t feel like I could talk to a lot of people about how I was feeling.
TS: Name a poem or a poet that impacts you the most and why?
AA: As I mentioned earlier, Franny Choi is a poet who has been very influential to me and my work and she wrote this one poem called “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History”. The reason why this poem has impacted me a lot is because it takes place at some unspecified place in the future, where police and prisons have long since been abolished. The poem follows a group of school children on a field trip to this museum and they look at an exhibit of guns and handcuffs, showing all the things that police used to control and brutalize people. These kids are like “how could this have been? How can someone allow this to happen?” That poem really opened my eyes in a lot of ways. Poetry, and art in general, is a powerful tool to imagine and put words to the kind of future that we want and world we want to build. This is very important for activism and organizing because it’s one thing to identify the things that are wrong with the world we live in, which is necessary, but in order for us to change the world we live in we have to know what we’re building towards. I think art is a really great tool for that, for radical imagination, because art doesn’t have to conform to the rules of what is possible right now and what is logical. When we say “we need to abolish prisons” the first thing that people say is “well what do we replace it with”. To me, that indicates a failure of imagination, that we’re so brainwashed by capitalism and the prison industrial complex that we can’t even imagine living in a world where those things don’t exist. But art gives us a tool through which we can imagine. So that poem really opened my eyes to a radical imagination.
TS: Tell me a little bit about the poem you sent me. What was happening when you wrote it, why did you write it?
AA: I wrote that poem during an online workshop. The workshop was for writers of Asian descent and it was about exploring identity through food writing, which is not something I’d done much. Food is such an important part of Asian culture and important way of connecting with your community. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 11 or 12 and that has been a bit of a struggle for me. Especially when I visit my family in Indonesia, since it’s not a vegetarian culture, so I always feel a little alienated because I can’t connect with my family in that same way through food. I think it just started with me reflecting on that through this workshop. And I went to HMart one night and looked at all the fish eyes looking at me, I looked back at them and I started thinking about meat and how important it is in a lot of cuisines and cultures. Also how it connects us to our tribal animal nature. Although I’ve been a vegetarian for so long, sometimes I’ll crave meat, even after not eaten it in well over 10 years. I thought about those things then this poem happened. I also really like writing gross poems, poems that are visceral and not beautiful in the traditional sense. Like there should be a space for joy in poetry, there should also be a space for ugliness and gross things. Not all art needs to be beautiful, sometimes it can just be weird and that’s fun too.
Review + Analysis of "A Vegetarian Goes to H Mart"
by: Tanairi Sorrentini
I loved interviewing Ally and reading this piece, especially with the context I was able to receive about it. The alliteration is sharp and they begin this poem with some vivid animalistic images of witnessing fish at a grocery store using words and phrases like “forbidden fruit”, “flesh” and “fingertips. My favorite moments in this poem are “a potpourri of fresh death” and the ending where “a thousand vacant eyes/look back at me, open-mouthed as if to say/someday, you too will be gutted”. I don’t think I’ve ever read and enjoyed a poem that presents its content in such a raw and gory manner. They mentioned during the interview that there should be a space for gross and disgusting poetry, yet I can’t help but feel there is a dark kind of beauty in the way they talk about the tragic fate of these frozen fish. Then, in an ominous way, they relate it back to the reader, who is also just an animal who will eventually succumb to death. Reading "A Vegetarian Goes to H Mart" felt like watching a horror film about zombies, except the zombies are dead fish, in the best way.