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

by Chen Chen

The sun sets like a whispered regret behind the hills or is that a mountain. Moths come to the screen door as if that was what they were made for.

Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel, elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

even in winter, no I don’t think the earth ever stops being alive,

I’m sorry, I meant for this to be an ode, a love letter, & it is, I swear, but the ways you’d been treated—I knew I couldn’t, on top of all that, lie to you. I didn’t intend to meet you & you yourselves were probably hoping for better. But isn’t this how it happens? Aren’t all great love stories, at their core, great mistakes?

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it by kissing you again & again while neither of us can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss I think every single dead person in every part of the world must crave with violent impossibility.

I’m envious of the clouds who can from time to time fall completely apart & everyone just says, It’s raining,

Don’t be a stranger, but be strange. Come by often for a cup of tea, in all your unbridled unknowability.

mom once told me, that the light made the dust rise, dance, beautiful— when on second thought, I can see the dust was just there, just dirt, & the light only made it visible.

Fall says, Stop naming children after me. I say, People name their kids Autumn, not Fall.

Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a frozen sea.

What does it mean, to sing in the language of those who have killed your mother, would kill her again? Does meaning shatter, leaving behind the barest moan? This English, I bear it, a master’s axe, yet so is every tongue—red with singing & killing. Are we even built for peace?

Racked by doubt, but not yet wrecked by it,

but they will die, & you, & I don’t want to know how the book ends, that the book ends,

So you sit, on the floor of the toy store, like the end of an avalanche, each rock, tree, & small wish of you crushed, heaped. & the scream of your total defeat is the cry that brought the mountain down.

I’ve befriended every shade of evening

But every kind of someone needs someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you I have memorized & recited & mistaken for the universe—another you.

To be the one my parents raised me to be— a season from the planet of planet-sized storms. To be a backpack of PB&J & every thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming their own storms. To

Trying to get over what my writer friend said, All you write about is being gay or Chinese. Wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white or an asshole.

After I told my mother I liked a boy & she said No. You’re sick. Get out before you get your brothers sick. 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. I’m trying to say, Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, & continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.