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

by Chen Chen

The greatest achievement of this book is its singular and sustained voice, poem after poem of a speaker whose obsessive and curious nature is that of an adult who refuses to give up seeing through the eyes of an adolescent, one who believes that the world is a malleable place and that asking the right questions changes its form.

But sometimes no one said anything & I saw him, the local paper boy on his route. His beanstalk frame & fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly happy.

We fell in love in midair.

I wanted to kiss a boy on the throat, not the soft, smooth neck but the protruding, tough core of a boy’s throat, the part named after the very first boy & the stupid fruit his girlfriend made him eat.

I didn’t tell him I spent all night in a tree because my mother slapped me after I told her I might be gay. I didn’t tell him that I hit her back, that my father tried holding us apart like the universe’s saddest referee.

The sun sets like a whispered regret behind the hills or is that a mountain.

I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard

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.

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?

will miss the particular quiet of my body, your body, opening a window to listen.

Your smile in the early dark is a paraphrase of Mars. Your smile in the deep dark is an anagram of Jupiter.

You itch for the window’s shore. You row, the growing light rearranging your voice, the rain your lunatic photographer.

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.

When did I first realize my parents were not infinite? That I could see the end of them? Past their capes & catchphrases?

For he looks happy & doesn’t know I’m looking & that makes his happiness free.

find the giant & return to him his treasure. I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map drawn in snow by our shadows shivering.