Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

by Chen Chen

we entered late afternoon’s house

Please excuse Chen Chen from class. He is currently dead.

I study to become a teacher a friend a useful hand

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.”

Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.

as if the sky were the only fact left,

I wonder if I’d be a better person if I learned to speak bird.

life is a joyful thing he said it’s probably very good for you

What is the shape of your body? Two snails: small, very small, exposed, after a rainstorm, on the front steps of a house in West Texas.

I want to answer my mother: No, I’m afraid of you because of you.

This afternoon, you believe another nap will solve all your life problems.

Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? I thought this time I’d write a book just about my father.

Your emergency contact has experienced an emergency.

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

When did I start loving my hair? My eyes? Have I started?

I wish poets were named after their superpowers. Like, The Amazing Volta. Or, Captain Syllable Count. Or, Super Self Doubter.

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

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

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.

But the last question I can remember, the one I keep remembering her answer to was in the hospital. & 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.

Then, knowing:107 The moon does not get sad. Or at least, not because of that. Of that, the moon is terribly proud.

You are wearing someone’s worst nightmare & you are124 who wore it best.