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

by Chen Chen

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

For he wears big headphones like little moons on his ears & begins to bounce in his chair for the room is becoming a continent of rhythms & almost- meanings & just-discovered birds only he can hear.

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

I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat the unplowed street & the fog that’s been erasing evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover it’s some giant’s lost silver blanket. I want to 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. I want to shiver against you, into you. I want the sound of your teeth. I want the sound of the wind.

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 want to growl, moan, whisper, grunt, hum, & howl your name. I want again & again your little dance, little booty shake in big snow boots, as I sing your name.

I am an elegy to be exhaled at dusk. I am an elegy to be written on a late October leaf. An elegy to be blown from its tree by a late October wind. To be stomped on & through by passersby old & young & dead & unborn. To be crinkled & crushed into tiny brown- orange pieces. & then collected, painstakingly, no, painfully, piece by piece, & assembled like a puzzle or collage or Egyptian god, but always incomplete, always a few bits & limbs missing. An elegy to be misplaced, stuffed away in the attic’s memory, & only brought out again once every occupant of the house has ceased. Yes, I am an elegy properly architectured by ruin.

& a book he will barely open but love to hold the weight of in his lap.

My heart whose irregular plural form is Hermes. My Hermes whose mouths are wings & thieves, begging the moon for a flood of wolves, the reddest honey. My job is to trick myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.

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.

I’m remembering what a writer friend once said to me, All you write about is being gay or Chinese—how I can’t get over that, & wonder if it’s true, if everything I write is in some way an immigrant narrative or another coming out story.

Wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white or an asshole. Wish I had said, No, I already write about everything— & everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair, carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn, mothers, bad habits, questions.