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

by Chen Chen

The major question of this book is how to feel. What is the proper emotional response to parents who physically attack us, to friends and family who object to our work as artists, to a nation that finds subtle ways to deny our citizenship while requiring our taxes?

I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year.

God said I am a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one.

We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence. He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm. I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them. Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.

No one had the time & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare.

& I knew: we would be so terribly happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.

then closed my eyes, thought of night, of the moon bobbing through it, like an Adam’s apple plucked out, bobbing through a dark absence of throat, oh silent & unkissed—that’s how I wanted you to suffer, too, boy who wouldn’t look at me. 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.

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

The sun sets like an expensive fragrance. Like the memory of a neck.

With the cry of bats. With the salt of circumstance. Without citizenship.

I like to say we left at first light with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car, my father fighting him off with firecrackers, even though Mao was already over a decade dead, & my mother says all my father did during the Cultural Revolution was teach math, which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe around Piano Island, a place I never read about in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family says they took me to, & that I loved. What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved? To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?

I like to say we left at first light, we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces, & the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner, who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.

First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

The day the window grew till it no longer fit the house was the night I decided to leave. I carried in my snake mouth a boxful of carnal autobiographies. I went in search of a face without theory.

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. There were some inside things I was going to make outside things, just for one person in a godless living room, full of passé plants.

I will stand, stay with the trees before me, their ancient charisma that cares for me. Like all scholars in any sort of heaven, I will study the metaphysics of madness. I will find that the littler the light, the better it tastes.

Or maybe I only love one person, & I’m beaming from it. Or actually I just love myself, & I want people to know. It seems the dead are busy with work we cannot comprehend. & like parents, they don’t want to tell you what their jobs really consist of, how much they make. They don’t want to scare you, the dead. With what’s left of their ankles, with their new secret wishes.

The trees, a madness of white & wind, we, a madness of sweat & rope, ropes of semen lassoing each other, closer— our competing, conspiring tongues, nipples, armpits, the terribly neglected inside bits of our elbows, which we’ve dubbed “bowpits,” & kiss.

A tragically un-epic way to go. Not a martyr, writer, “real” actor, no activist, not even Asian American, just someone who looked like me, if I worked out more than twice a year, & could make tonguing the hairy sweat from a man’s ass look like a Hiroshige, & had the marathon heart to fuck the beautiful out of five not-as-well-paid but also very talented human beings.

& I’m sorry for staring as I did, it’s just that you somehow managed to look at once elegant & weary, I mean each of you sitting so still with your legs tucked beneath your body, & then your sleepy eyes. I mean, the four of you were like a quartet of elderly duchesses. (I’m sorry, later I looked you up on the zoo website & found out you were all males.) 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?

& holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness, with your infinite arms.

You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness. I wish it could unbelong itself from me, unstick from my face. Who invented the word “ennui”? A sad Frenchman?

But does my sadness always need to be your sadness? 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 my neighbors who live in a cooler house. I’m envious of Neruda for having written better poems & for having lived in a cooler house. I’m envious of poetry for being more & better than I could ever be. I’m envious of the redwood who never has to say I am & who will outlive me. I’m envious of those who can consistently resist pseudo-Buddhist romanticizations of nonhuman entities. 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. My envy despises your more dramatic & photogenic envy.

I’m envious of my friend who’s envious of me because he actually wants something I have.

I’m envious of jealous God because although he’s been dead for ages, everyone keeps caring about him, or at least saying his name, & God knows who’ll do that for me, ten, twenty years after I go.

With great humanitarian effort, I too put on my heavy coat, ready to step out. But then you kiss me, & we fall, flop, our altruistic gesture dropped, giving way to cuddling, again. It seems tonight that neither of us can embrace more than one Other, no matter how fine it sounds in French. So can’t we just stay in bed, in our coats, pressed against each (singular) Other, & otherwise adhering to Sartre’s l’enfer c’est les autres, till we fall asleep & dream that we went, that our dream-throats drank down an appropriately wild amount of beer, & our dream-hands threw, one stunning fluke round, a winning dart? & afterwards, we texted everyone: Don’t be a stranger, but be strange. Come by often for a cup of tea, in all your unbridled unknowability.

think I can hear him, racing between the lung-shaped trees.

These bridges are a feat of engineering. These pork & chive dumplings we bought together, before hopping on a train & crossing bridges, are a feat of engineering. Talking to you, crossing bridges in trains, eating pork & chive dumplings in your bright boxcar of a kitchen in Brooklyn, is an engineer’s dream-feat of astonishment. Tonight I cannot believe the skyline because the skyline believes in me,

By the way, is this soy sauce reduced sodium? Do you know? Do we care? High, unabashed sodium intake! Unabashed exclamation points! New York is an exclamation

How we dipped index finger, thumb. Sealed each dumpling like tucking in a secret, goodnight. The meat of a memory. A feat of engineering.

We loved Howl & the Tao when it was still spelled with a T. We loved green tea but often had Orangina instead. We loved Trakl & a darkly declarative sentence. We loved different genders but knew we were just two variations on the theme, horny teenage boy. We loved Heidegger & dwelling in your kitchen, drinking Orangina, being there, for an hour, two, being moved by each other’s stillnesses.

& consider the smallness of our hands. They were like ellipses, master procrastinators, unable to finish things & not wanting to, they loved fooling with the point, multiplying the period . . . elongating the time . . . the words spent together

Think of peace & how the Buddhists say it is found through silence. Think of silence & how Audre Lorde says it will not protect you. Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a frozen sea. Think of speaking as a violence, when speaking is a house that dresses your life in the tidiest wallpaper. It makes your grief sit down, this house. It makes you chairs when you need justice. It keeps your rage room temperature. I’ve been thinking about how the world is actually unbearable. About all those moments of silence we’re supposed to take. Each year, more moments, less life, & perhaps

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.

Racked by doubt, but not yet wrecked by it, I pray to the microwave, the crisper drawer, the lemony dish soap, please, fish me out of this funk so I can stop puttering around the kitchen, scarfing fries, chips, every manmade form of potato, including mashed, even stuffed, doubled over by dour, but not yet doomed to it,

it doesn’t give people any strength, this sad endlessly selfish syntax, though maybe it’s getting better,

The reader falls endlessly into her book. The train is an accordion, playing the silence of adult waiting.

IF I SHOULD DIE TOMORROW, PLEASE NOTE THAT I WILL MISS THE PARTICULAR music of the word “callipygian,” which means the having of well-shaped buttocks. I will miss the particular cruelty

The sound the sea makes at night, delivering its own telegrams— a sort of sensual moo. I will miss the particular quiet of my body, your body, opening a window to listen.

You are an unhappy thing, cursed with legs, every step carrying the love who left, the love you left, the job lost, the mountain of low, the mounting lack. But your legs grow tired of holding it, so you transfer it to your head. Then your head grows tired, so you delegate it to your shoulders. Then they are tired & you are tired & you don’t know what to do but replant it in your legs,

reports. & thus i pledge allegiance to the always partial, the always translated, the always never of knowing who’s walking around, what’s being left behind, the signs, the cries, the breadcrumbs & the blood. the toenails & armpit hair of our trying & failing to speak

I want to be as beautiful as carrot cake.

I am knowledgeable in advanced aftermath. I am proficient in scowling. Often I am a counterculture pistachio on casual Friday.

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

NIGHT FALLS LIKE A BUTTON from your grandmother’s coat. You worry with your thumb the stranger’s page. Aging spine of the black sky, night-burps of the sleeping computer. Don’t listen to the judgment of your scraped knees.

You try to sew the night onto your own coat, but it won’t stay. Too much memory weather, werewolf migration. You itch for the window’s shore. You row, the growing light rearranging your voice, the rain your lunatic photographer.

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

I will try my best not to mistake you for my parents I mean my problems with my parents I mean me. Believe with me another melody. That the room, the life could go by a different light & we could say hello. Meaning gentleness with all our might.

The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of, says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month. But what I am capable of is staring