Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

Please excuse Chen Chen from class. He is currently dead. He came in last Thursday, exhibiting clear signs of dying, such as saying in a clear voice, I am nothing except the wish to listen to Coldplay, & after one too many plays of their 2002 hit “The Scientist,” he is dead.

his mother becomes a factwe areflatfar I learn where the free food ishe learns to say She was

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.

Because I had to learn who the important white people were. & we worship immigrant hardship instead of building a house more breathable.

we’ll be gone after these brief messages

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

Sometimes I have no idea which is better to use: “on” or “in.” Place your hope on. Place your hope in. When I search online, most of the sites that appear in the results have to do with passages from the Bible. Place your hope in God. On God. Though I don’t believe in him, it seems rude to place anything on God, even hope. I imagine God, sitting in heaven, weighed down by all the weighty abstractions people continue to place on him. Hope, immortality, truth, goodness, forgiveness, perfect love. Perfect speech.

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.

Sometimes, every living thing just sounds like: Please. Other times, Please don’t. Please no.

include those that arrive in December like gasps, like they’ve walked into a surprise party, & they are the party,

In college, a poetry professor asked, Are you from Whitman or from Dickinson? which sounded like he was asking, Are you American?

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.

you are my favorite unabridged absurdity

Three queers feeling like twenty, drinking ever more coffee, telling sleep to go bother the straights.