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. Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

I catch, am caught in the winged weather above food court & student union. I listen to the grackle orchestra of unrelenting shriek. I study the blur of their long-tailed swerving, their bodies like comets, frenzied commas, yet unable, finally, to mark, to contain the wide blue Texas sky. Still, they try. Every beak & claw, every uncalm feather tries, as if the sky were the only fact left, as if the grackles have been told to memorize it, as if someone, someday, will ask them to speak it, this long blue sentence.

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

I wish I wasn’t tired of his sadness. But I’d rather look at the snow, falling like silver confetti, another pretty thing my mind can make.

& the trees give off a silvery smell that’s become your entire summer.

Can you describe a morning you woke without fear?

I keep hearing their laughter, moments before.

Wow

beauty of lubbock alleyways & their raccoons. beauty of those dauntless dumpster divers. beauty of not caring if the soul exists, so long as the heat of his inner thighs does.

(I want to remember better. But I want more, more of the better to remember.)

My favorite season: horny during a snowstorm. My favorite sad: sad while watching ducks waddle about. My favorite recent development: that ghosts prefer to be called spooky babes. Some of my favorite sunlights include those that arrive in December like gasps, like they’ve walked into a surprise party, & they are the party, & it is a ghost party.

Many of the things I miss are pretty silly. Pretty & silly. & I miss them deeply.

I think it’s what any artist hopes for: not only to be remembered, but to be company.

Jasmine tea. Property tax. War but they see our hands are already full of it. So. The notion that if we mourned every single person killed just today. Learned the name & wept the name. If we had the body. To grieve every body. They bring it to our doorstep.

My song is snow in March, in May. My song is eighty degrees the next day. My song couldn’t decide what to get you, so here, everything.

September, again & she is not, again & he keeps thinking of things to ask her then remembering he can’t,

& you are back home & you are my favorite unabridged absurdity

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? Does to love mean to worry, to be a worrier on the snowy field of another’s face?

& rain, a love that hurts to give, receive. Have I wanted to hurt you back? Did my poems hurt you? Do I want these words to wound?

cauldron full of you, come teach me a little bit of nothing, in the dark abundant hours.

Now I see even a little gay sex & French poetry would make some folks better citizens.

How already you were supposed to be not. & yes, I am talking to myself. Saying, suppose otherwise. Suppose a life so long & gorgeously silly, viewers will complain about everything left out from your biopic, which will star an actor so handsome every audience member will gasp, in unison, upon first seeing him

said, Thank God without believing in thanks. I thought what my parents did, that wasn’t poetry. I believed what white people said about my parents. I had to say, Stop. Stop believing them.

They leapt & thrashed, they were stars, stars, stars. I woke up weeping. Do you understand? I thought I could only fall asleep doing that.