Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.” Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.” Or dead. Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

Tony will toss out a dog-eared copy of the manual he received upon arriving in America— How to Have Deeply Sorrowful Exchanges with Your Son About Your Immigrant Hardships: How to Make Him Understand He Must Become a Neurosurgeon/At Least a Dentist.

I catch, am caught in the winged weather above food court & student union.

we worship immigrant hardship instead of building a house more breathable.

take everyone through the wound of it. Through the cat with a hummingbird in its mouth. Through my much-desired never-fulfilled Halloween costume, which was the wheel from Wheel of Fortune.

Three nights your book has held my childhood & nowhood in its peppermint boat while a great many flutes were played, probably all by Björk.

Out at a housewarming & all I want is Totoro’s Catbus to furball in, ferry me back, back to your pages, a fourth night. How could I have forgotten the beautifully rude option of just bringing your book along?

Your book, a reminder of how much more night I could wade into.

I was born here but grew up there & I grew up there but was born of soup, both mung bean & primordial

god stopped by in his magenta rowboat i said god you have to stop stopping by if you’re never going to tell me the meaning of life god said life is meaningless while language often means too much

How do you tell someone you love them without making them think about one day losing you?

I want to answer my mother: No, I’m afraid of you because of you.

God is a honey flavored extra strength cough drop. I am another attempt to confess I have not read Ulysses.

If we could communicate fully, there would be no need to communicate. If we could love perfectly, there would be no need to love. If we could finish grieving, there would be no need to live. If we could touch completely, there would be no need.

The Texas sky changes color like a vast PowerPoint very proud of itself.

In the event of a sudden loss of cabin meaning, back-up meanings will drop from the overhead compartment.

beauty of mitski, tweeting about caring so much, saying, fuck effortlessness. fuck that. try really hard and let everyone see.

My least favorite any time story: Once upon a time, in a Boston area laundromat, I remembered middle school, all of it, & I couldn’t stop hating my hair.

I didn’t know I was a whole country’s favorite way to say somewhere not real.

I wish poets were named after their superpowers. Like, The Amazing Volta. Or, Captain Syllable Count. Or, Super Self Doubter.

Rain falls. I press my head against a foreign pillow. It’s too green. I try to sleep, to let my mind leave me & then, reenter.

Have you heard about this new virus? That a body like yours, like mineis once again presumed sick, preferred dying, pronounced tragic-ally already dead?

Surely, there is a patron saint of touch, who yes, at the moment is struggling—unlike the brand-new patron saint of branded touchless experiences, whose business has only been expanding.

I miss walking through a museum by myself. That sweet surrounded-by-art aloneness. Solitude enhanced, perfected—by unwearable pantsuits, hairy suitcases. I think it’s what any artist hopes for: not only to be remembered, but to be company.

Their aunties who each bring just a thimble of thunder.

To aubergine or not to aubergine, that is never the question.

My heart comes back in a very large FedEx box. As though it has accumulated many new possessions. But no, it is just surrounded by a lavish amount of bubble wrap.

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling on the string that makes my cardboard mother more motherly, except she is not cardboard, she is already, exceedingly my mother.

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, except the home is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone, & not the one who needs to learn, has to—Remind me what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says to my mother, as though they have always, easily talked. As though no one has told him many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets slasher flick meets psychological pit he is now co-starring in. Remind me, he says to our family.

you are my favorite unabridged absurdity

to land in the unruly field of my bangs,

To be sick in the heart of winter. No. To be sick with a winter’s heart. No. To be sick with winter for you—is that the love I feel? A perpetual inner December?

The sky tonight, so without aliens. The woods, very lacking in witches. But the people, as usual, replete with people. & so you, with your headset, sit in the home office across the hall, stuck in a hell of strangers crying, computers dying, the new father’s dropped-in-toilet baby photos, the old Canadian, her grandson Gregory, all-grown-up-now Greg, who gave her this phone but won’t call her.

Cross the hall, you sings-the-chorus-too-soon, you makes-a-killer-veggie-taco, you played-tennis-in-college-build, you Jeffrey, you Jeff-ship full of stars, cauldron full of you, come teach me a little bit of nothing, in the dark abundant hours.

why do only successes get to be smashing, why not a smashing failure!

Yes, I am talking to myself as though it is my birthday. & this is my gift: telling myself what I was never told: suppose in one part of your (still 3-hr-long) biopic it is your 88th birthday. All day you exclaim, I’m 88! At your party—I’m 88!

You are wearing someone’s worst nightmare & you are who wore it best.

Do you remember when we first rhymed?

The other type of eternity is outside of time, beyond it, no beginning, no end. I remember. Your hand, the lid, your hands, the steering wheel, your lips, your lips. The way you took a sip, gave me a kiss, before starting to drive.

Remember when I asked you about the rain, the cats & dogs of it, if it was 50% cats, 50% dogs, 100% falling, & you said, Of course?

I remember your mother was an endless, a question your face asked into my shoulder. How I wanted it to answer because I couldn’t.

I smelled a form of justice. I wanted to be a poet. I waved my living hands, dead coupons.

Watch the pattering rain sketch an anarchist’s map to the future, then unpattern it away— an anarchist’s revision.