Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

Or, if he remains his remains, they will find themselves fully content with the memory of Chen Chen, their sweet Chen Chen, before he became so whatever he was. They will think of him, so fondly, while sharing a bowl of strawberry ice cream, the last thing they remember him loving.

he learns to say She was we learn to say I’m fineto shout You don’t knowyou just don’t we refuseto learn leavingwe hold & holdeach other’s sleepwe dream & climbthe tallestleafiesttree

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.

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.

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

I wonder if I’d be a better person if I learned to speak bird. The grackles say I should learn to pick up the phone. I ask for a different assignment. Call, the grackles say. Call back.

You’re in touch with The Way as well as The Wants of boys, flaunting such innovative hair. & the trees give off a silvery smell that’s become your entire summer. You walk slowly. You want, you try to ask the smell what these trees are called.

I am trying to be marvelous. & to make my enemies throw up. I mean, if you shower with soap & eat well, maintaining consistent gastrointestinal health, you should be ready for a rimjob or other forms of anal play. My boyfriend & I are not platonic. From the TV: a white supremacist cites Science, barks Two sides to every— I mean, up the throat, out the mouth: the fastest, the only way the powerful will let go of their shit.

Who are you & whom do you love? My fingers smell of lime & his sex. My mouth smells of his mouth. My hair smells of the moment the lawnmower growled by our curtained bedroom window, just as we started touching.

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? I walk home calmly. I kiss him. I kiss him. I forget to tell him about the truck. Or: I don’t tell him because he’s told me how often he thinks about death, his & mine, & I don’t want to scare him, don’t want him thinking & thinking about what could’ve happened that night, what could happen tonight. How do you tell someone you love them without making them think about one day losing you? I kiss him. In the moment, I don’t think about why I’m not telling him.

Then you think, you’re saying, No. I meant them. Not every word. But every sound.

How does a body forget all danger & become song, swoon?

How does a queer body—

Their clumsy-but- don’t-care, their beauty, the beauty of the night lit up by a lyric, a kiss, some impossibly impeccable hair. Forgetting all danger because the lungs need to. The legs.

How sings a body. 13.

One night I walk by a soccer field & see college boys playing, touching each other rough, bare chest meeting bright T-shirt shoulder, & I can’t help but think, sports are super gay, think, the word “glistening” must’ve been invented for just this sight, their moonlit collisions, my instant replays in slowest cue the soft music motion.

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death? I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him. I kiss him.

Who are you & whom do you love? 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.

But knowing my mother, 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. Drew, what did you say to the unlistening? To the heart that prefers a shineless shirt?

Years later, earlier today, I said, I’m a poet as though saying, Yes, really, I’m a person. Once upon a time, after school, I played Mozart. I played. I didn’t know I was a whole country’s favorite way to say somewhere not real. Or maybe I did know, but not enough to stop moving my hands across the keys. Would I love the piano now? Could I play my favorites? Would I see my hands’ movement, my hands as sunlight?

The way I don’t care if heaven exists, so long as men’s musky armpits do.

To realize some of my writing is just my saying to white men: Look how lovable I am.

How I’ve thought that being with a white man would whiten me, lighten my lonely. & actually, factually, being with some white men has blanketed me while covering me in lonelier. The fact that I love J. for J. Just as this country does. Most of this country does, before learning he has a boyfriend. What percentage of this country loves me, after reading my name, after seeing my face, after hearing me talk about my boyfriend?

The way I hid itbetween two more innocent-looking books I’ve long since forgotten. This habit I beganin high school—sneaking into my backpack, then my room, all the queerlit, every bit of this aliveness I could find. The fact—the fact I’d love to dispute, deny,but can’t—that it took until college to find books & writers both queer & Asian.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.

we can’t help but continue to make ourselves.

You soften the fright away with syllable after syllable of your hand. /

I keep seeing it in slow motion, though I didn’t actually see their falling. The sunflowers, overcome with true dizzying delight—with themselves.

Carol, you may assist me now. If you are indeed the holy rep of sunflowers, Carol—please make row after row flicker up in the night, in the worry-field of my mother’s head. Help her sleep. & dream only of glowing, petal-soft things.

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

You climb back in bed to touch my face. You wrap your arms around me & it’s like you’re the patron saint of touch as well as soft sunlight & soothed dogs. Or you must be the earthly representative of divine holding. Or you’re both & also a boy, like me, holding on.

Words we’ve spoken to our parents that we would take back. That we wouldn’t. The blue pen that exploded. What bees wear at night when they want to feel sexy. The math of Halley’s Comet. A miracle but we just couldn’t accept, no no, that’s far too much, you’re too kind, no. 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.

I only know the beginning & the end. Everything else is a superlative question—a supervoid I have come to view as my innermost joy.

I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule

I can’t stop hearing, seeing her voice, her face in the hospital, when the social worker came, asked if everyone in the room was family—when his mother, from her bed, looked right at me, said, Yes.

why did your name for me also have to be SoBrave&Strong, why not just Loved?

Then, knowing: The moon does not get sad. Or at least, not because of that. Of that, the moon is terribly proud.

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? Once, you said you were worried I’d get my brothers, your other (truer?) sons, sick. More than once. The both of you. Said. This. Sick with what, neither of you could say out loud. Get out before you get them sick, too. & now the country we live in believes everyone with a face like ours is sick. Our sick faces, sick countries, go back before you get us sick.

Winter, in a word that means shield & shattered, roof & 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?

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

I reread the sonnet, the ode, then go, inspired, horny, to the one I love. Tongue in armpit in asshole tongue on cock on cock tongue in love. My poetics of deepthroat & tonguefuck. I love my poetics.

Thank goodness for alternatives to “penis” & “anus.” Thank goodness for cocks & Rimbaud & butts & sonnets & amour & ass & Verlaine & dicks in the relentless middle of summer in Lubbock.

as though it is my birthday. & this is my gift: telling myself what I was never told: suppose in one part of your (still 3-hr-long) biopic it is your 88th birthday. All day you exclaim, I’m 88! At your party—I’m 88! to every friend & fellow 80-something silly faggot. You are wearing someone’s worst nightmare & you are who wore it best. & then the cake? Not 88 candles, but still a ridiculous number. Flames & flames. Suppose you blow them out, wishing for more blazing, more you. Suppose you know already: there will be.

then I almost said, What the fuck are you saying, almost leapt out of my chair to ask the other guy, Why the fuck are you fucking nodding, but I didn’t, I got scared, no, not of them, of my hands, how my hands had curled into fists—

is memory the best eternity we can make? The only?

In bed I touched his voice in his belly. I touched his Goodnight. He said it always like it was important. It was important.

Prove my doubt so wrong. Call the sun the heterophobe it’s always been.