Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Obit [“Control. . . .”]
Control—died on August 3, 2015, along with my mother. Suddenly I was no longer in the middle of the earth. Suddenly I could change the angle of the liquid pen so that the rocket went the other way. And all the children stopped crying. My sister set up the appointment with the neurologist and he tested my father. What is your name? My father said, what what the system is…what, as he reached into his wallet and gave the doctor his credit card. His finger angrily pointing at me. We left with prescriptions for my father in my hands: antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills. My mother hadn’t thought to medicate him. So much depends on the questions we ask. How is he feeling and how are you feeling is the difference between life and death. I held onto the small white paper as it waved slowly in the wind like a surrender flag. That day dusk didn’t arrive. I went into it.
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)