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

by Chen Chen

For Chen Chen, poetry is the place where the sacred is reached through the profane,

I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be.

This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending church except for gay weddings.

the University, the glass & concrete country where my parents put on their best American accents & smiles, to earn degrees the equivalents of which they’d already earned in China.

Esperance, NY as if “hope” in French is a higher quality hope. Made of jewels & brie.

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

I was so sad & so teenaged, one day my host sister gripped my hand hard & even harder said, SOIS HEUREUX. BE HAPPY. & miraculously, I wasn’t sad anymore. All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister.

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.

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

I mope with some hope,

Possible future twitter bio

I thought you were my best friend, but you’re just a paperback copy of Madame Bovary I haven’t been able to finish,

Burn!

We were two horses in search of the least abandoned constellation.

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

But every kind of someone needs someone else to insist with.

To be, in my spare time, America for my uncle, who wants to be China for me.

For he is an atheist but makes room for the unseen, unsayable.

Because the article apologized specifically to poets—sorry, you hopeless saps—as though we automatically believe in love more than anyone else

I know, though, that there are believers who don’t believe out of fear solely. They actually love you.

My job is to trick adults into knowing they have hearts.

My job is to trick myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.

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. 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.

Still, good to meet you. I’m trying out this thing where it’s good to meet people.

I’m afraid of farting, even around people I love. Do you think your mother loves you when you fart?

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.