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

by Chen Chen

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.

The major question of this book is how to feel.

comedy is juxtaposed with a sense of wonder

My personality?

the speaker is most hungry to know how to be, how to feel. And of course, he won’t be satisfied with any answer until he has thoroughly reviewed every possibility, every option for becoming a more whole self

Come amble & ampersand

She wants them to gulp up the world,

I’M NOT A RELIGIOUS PERSON BUT God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in Lemme get back to you.

It got so bad God personally had to speak to me.

This was annoying because I’m not a religious person.

God did not listen to me. God is not a good listener.

Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint.

I tried to enrage God

I tried to confuse God

God ended up relating to me.

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend.

My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend.

My mother was in the hospital & I didn’t want to be her friend.

My mother was in the hospital & she didn’t want to be her friend.

She didn’t trust my father to be it. You always forget something, she said, even when I do the list for you. Even then.

Our kissing would rhyme with cardiac arrest.

We fell in love in midair.

planning to run away—if not far away enough, then for long away enough that my parents would start to miss me.

I knew something about the sadness of the facts,

The sun sets like a new regret like a flute I am learning to play & I’m bad at it. Progress is slow.

With the salt of circumstance.

With cities fueled by scars. With the footprint of a star.

What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?

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.

saw violence in anything with a face. I wished for a place big enough for grief, & all I got was more grief,

do not fall down or in love

& yet it’s true, I watched you, & I’m sorry for staring as I did, it’s just that you somehow managed to look at once elegant & weary,

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

But isn’t it true, you are not always why I am happy. & I promise it is true, you are almost never why, why I am sad.

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.

But does my sadness always need to be your sadness?

I’m envious of jealous God & those who always know the difference between envy & jealousy. 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.

how can we make things stay? how can I, when my brain is all wind, drift—

Unabashed exclamation points! New York is an exclamation I take, making my escape,

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

being there, for an hour, two, being moved by each other’s stillnesses.

Think of peace & how the Buddhists say it is found through silence. Think of silence & how Audre Lorde says it will not protect you.

Racked by doubt, but not yet wrecked by it,

The reader falls endlessly into her book.

I am knowledgeable in advanced aftermath.

I’ve befriended every shade of evening & they cannot recommend me highly enough.

My weakness is that I listen.

I forgot to fear abandonment & abandoned myself beautifully

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

It is time to show the universe what you are capable of,

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