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.

My mother said she is pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new Asian Jesus.

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

Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel, elsewhere?

It seems the dead are busy with work we cannot comprehend.

Every day I am asked to care about white people,

I mean, the four of you were like a quartet of elderly duchesses.

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

You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness.

I’m envious of the clouds who can from time to time fall completely apart & everyone just says, It’s raining, & someone might even bring cats & dogs into it, no one says, Stop being so dramatic or You should see a professional.

I try to build a bridge to my parents but only reach my mother & it’s a bridge she’s about to jump off of.

I try to hold it together, though maybe should let it go,

Spring says it doesn’t want to be personified,

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

Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers.