Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

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.

Because I had to learn who the important white people were. & we worship immigrant hardship instead of building a house more breathable. To read & remember & know & say so, without the echo of an accent.

My boyfriend’s mother lives in a box. My boyfriend lives with his mother in slow, not quite stories during breakfast. I wish I wasn’t tired of his sadness.

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

I’m from the cat we agree to call Simon. I’m from his other names. I’m from his future names. I’m from the hunger between his names.

This list of five things I love, in no particular order: Oak trees. Men’s calves. Honey oolong milk tea with boba. The interrobang. A video in which a young Björk says, You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.

My mother, already sick, chronically sick in three different ways. She says not to send anything. How I want to send her all the sunflowers.

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating every movement of a proper family, as if a pair of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars is watching from the outside.