Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

Please excuse Chen Chen from class. He is currently dead.

Medically speaking, Chen Chen’s current state is very gross.

Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel size lint roller just in case.

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.

you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change. To make me promise I would. To make me promise. & promise.

Your emergency contact has called to quit. Your back-up plan has backed away. Your boyfriend has joined a boy band named All Your Former Boyfriends & Sarah McLachlan.

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

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