When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

by Chen Chen

I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic. Come amble & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter.

Tall latte, short tale, bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café.

Our kissing would rhyme with cardiac arrest.

Seeing you run so beautifully on the track that afternoon, I wanted you to suffocate, breath-starved from all the miles you’d run away from me.

There’s a town in Upstate New York called Esperance where the gravity works fine.

I’m not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.

First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

I carried in my snake mouth a boxful of carnal autobiographies.

I saw violence in anything with a face. I wished for a place big enough for grief, & all I got was more grief, plus People magazine.

Aren’t all great love stories, at their core, great mistakes?

The train is an accordion, playing the silence of adult waiting.

They were in search of the least abandoned constellation.

Now that you are not even the rain, what train can I take? Remember when we were morning after morning of such ordinary waiting, of hair still wet in the April light & suitcases held tight?

for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me: to be brought into a patterned world of weathers & reports.

If you’d like I can alphabetize all my regrets but I’ll have to start from H.

My sole weakness is being the chairperson of my own childhood.

In this economy of acute magpie syndrome. Where “just a hobby” is the strongest industry. & we work overtime at our reverie.

You try to sew the night onto your own coat, but it won’t stay. Too much memory weather, werewolf migration.

The licorice of every season was rather inappropriate.

I tried to ask my parents to leave the room, but not my life. It was very hard. Because the room was the size of my life. Because my life was small. & wanted to eat candy corn instead of confrontation. Raising one’s voice in a small space felt at once godlike & childish.

I admire my horoscope for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day, there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

north & mouth uncompass me

I want to, baby, want to believe it’s always possible to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years, four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter inside my lungs.

I want to be the Anti-Sisyphus, in love with repetition, in love, in love. Foolish repetition, wise repetition. I want more hours, I want insomnia, I want to replace the clock tick with tambourines.

I am an elegy properly architectured by ruin.

My heart whose irregular plural form is Hermes.

Heartbeat elephantine, serpentine, opposite of saturnine. I drive in the downpour, the road conjugated into uproar, by hearts I do not know. By the guttural & gargantuan highway lion. The 18-wheeler whose shawl of mist is a mane of newborn grandmothers.

she lost me, in the new country, but doesn’t that happen to all parents & their children, one way or another, & don’t we need to get lost?

Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers. Eventually, a street appears where they can meet again. Or not. Do I love my mother? Do I have to forgive in order to love? Or do I have to love for forgiveness to even be possible? What do you think? I’m trying out this thing where questions about love & forgiveness are a form of work I’d rather not do alone.