Poetry: “Autobiography of the Fox Woman” by Peihe Feng
There is something addictive and fantastical about Peihe Feng’s “Autobiography of the Fox Woman.” The poem, written by the Fox Woman herself, supposedly provides insight into the mystical and mysterious life of Daji, who is explained to be the paramour of King Zhou, but is somehow also a malevolent fox spirit. This parallel between the historical record and the fantasy that has come from the rumor and folk tale that accompany this mythic figure is a kind of epic fairy tale we don’t see often in contemporary poetry, and even more rarely do we see it done well. Feng provides us with some escapism here, but we also see some gorgeous language, expertly handled narrative, and gratuitous violence—what else could we possibly want from our poems? This one checks every possible box and its ambiguity, the way we aren’t sure who is good and who is evil, particularly resonates.
Daji(妲己) is the paramour of King Zhou of the Shang dynasty in ancient China. She came to his kingdom as a prisoner of war. Throughout history, she is believed to have lured the king into cruel misdeeds and led his kingdom into ruins. In many folk stories, she is depicted as a malevolent fox spirit who unleashes the evils for the world by transforming into the shape of a beautiful woman and seducing men.
They always kept a fox in the palace – not the woman
with hair piled up in a statuette of a pagan god & refused
to take off the bloodstained skirt she wore
as a captive from a dead kingdom faraway.
The fox is the one
all in silver, stainless as the sword he wore
the day he saw it hissed at me and bared its teeth.
I was the only women in the palace to put my fingers into
its mouth so red
that it felt like stirring a wound; to caress its teeth
the way I once saw a blind slave leading an elephant by its tusk
back at home, swallowing back the urge
to press my cheek against it & lay my head down in the cradle
of swamp-wet scarlet until he pulled me away
one arm pressuring my heart, the other a serpent
coiling around my waist so I’d had to spit out the spirit
that possessed me or faint. A fox does not hunt like that.
They pierce instead of squeeze; tear instead of devour.
The fox tooth cut my fingers & now I felt my canine
dug into my lower lips as I took wine from his cup. My skin
gleamed like the savage moon over our homelands as
he torn my old garments and dressed me in silk. My jaw
clenched with an instinct that ran through my bones like pain
as he squeezed his tongue into my mouth & promised me
his kingdom.
I heard the fox vanished the day the palace
tumbled down. That was lifetimes ago, and yet I remember
the torches that scorched a hole on my golden skin
& exposed the silver furs beneath. Stones
thrown to shatter my jaw & remold it into an awl-shaped
snout. The lance driving through my heart that released me
from a woman’s body. I remember becoming
a sheath while sliding into this world
with my body coated in the sheen of moonlit snow, my limbs
wading through the rubble until my red-dyed nails
were lost to the soil. My first memory was running
through a dark tight tunnels. They saw me laboring
laid bare between her thighs; her teeth
sunken deep inside her moonlike cheeks.
Peihe Feng
Peihe Feng is a young writer from Guangzhou, China. She has published a prose collection in Chinese, and her English poems are featured or forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine, manywor(l)ds, Delta Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She enjoys gardening on the balcony with her cat.
