Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

I see how my past is a nun who knows a lot of state birds & my future is a pancake-shaped abyss.

I am nothing except the wish to listen to Coldplay, & after one too many plays of their 2002 hit “The Scientist,” he is dead.

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.

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

How could I have forgotten the beautifully rude option of just bringing your book along?

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

god got back in his turquoise steamship life is a joyful thing he said it’s probably very good for you

What makes poop more pungent on certain days? A question for science.

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

I can’t decide whether the university is a refuge for the bookish lonely or a T-shirt store run by a soda company.

Gun ownership is a basic American right, an important part of what makes our society free. & despite the impressive lack of intonation, my chest wondered if she owned a gun, if she ever carried in class, if I would notice, if she noticed during her five minutes how I was trying not to be angry with her five minutes—my trying, my face, she must’ve seen.

& I can’t help but think, sports are super gay,

The body’s truest thought is play, moon.

I tell him & he holds me. I tell him about the truck, its very large redness. He holds me & says, as he’s said before, We’re both going to live to a hundred & then die peacefully in our sleep at the exact same time. I say, Yes, I say, Absolutely. I kiss him, Yes. At the same time I think, But what about two hundred? Three?

What do you remember about the earth? 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.

In other words, aren’t both the triumphant & the tragic coming-out narratives white constructions, anyway? why do you need to talk to your mother about everything, anyway? does she need to be your best friend?

I can say she would hold it, even on the news, for everyone to see, because a not-small part of her would rather miss me than listen to me, listen to me say, again, I love him.

fuck effortlessness. fuck that. try really hard and let everyone see.

beautiful, to learn about her work, for her to learn about my loneliness. beauty of our lonelinesses talking.

Your It’s alright. Your I’m here. Your Fuck it & quick grip & before I know it. Your logic more beautiful than mine.

My favorite recent development: that ghosts prefer to be called spooky babes.

Once upon a time, at dinner, I told my mother to stop making so much, why do you have to make so much lu dou tang all. the. time. & she said, I thought it was your favorite.

The fact that I can’t write about the snow without writing about standing in it, still as a tree, wishing it would cover my entire body in a thick blanket of white, white, white. To realize some of my writing is just my saying to white men: Look how lovable I am.

Is posing all this as a set of questions when I already know the answers a form of lying? Sure. It’s May, I need this form of lying.

How I’m still shedding the unaliveness, the lie that queer & Asian must mean un- & never-innocent, that to live like you is to choose pain & sorrow& pain.

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

Or, the one about the fourth hedgehog of the post-apocalypse.

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

Asking, does the moon ever get sad? Needing to know, does the moon get terribly sad because it is simply called the moon, & not some fancy Greek name, like the myriad moons of Jupiter, like Callisto, for example, from the Greek kallistos, superlative form of kalos, meaning “beautiful”?

& you are my favorite unabridged absurdity

but (& eternally) fuck that

In the armpit of summer. In the asshole of August. In the what-the-fuck-am-I-doing of more grad school.