POETRY
Ana Chen, Chaim Durst, Kelsey Chen, Trang N. Le
Ana Chen, Chaim Durst, Kelsey Chen, Trang N. Le
Symph
Ana Chen
here is the woman speaking on heartbeat:
press your finger to your cheek. listen. funneled swollen through one dimple, bone channel radio code. blood embroidered as metronome. it thrums hollow in canyons of dead skin, bass testament to the grunts of the fathers, the grief-skewered giggles of the mothers. in the silence between two beats your breath slides white hands around your ears. in the silence you pour yourself out of your fingers, back down your throat. you feel this silence thumbprinting your third eye, teeth tender over your brow. you don’t know when you trusted yourself to these shattered tides.
here is the woman speaking on footstep:
in the night your brother slops down the stairs, bones in a bag in a storm of skin of wood. toes crash cannoning against banister, chest before legs before gravity. the footstep is the prayer against falling. in time you will scream through baba’s carpet slippers, bury foam in the cemetary you call soles as the floor finally regurgitates itself, pulls its viscera from its lungs, crawls to the basement to die. the footstep is four if you count the whiplash of flip-flop on heel, if you worship the echoes of your grandfather’s feet. but you do not kneel and yeye grovels on dust and even your father cannot slap shame into you. as you walk away your steps are silent.
here is the woman speaking on chewing:
it is my belief that noise is uninvited to the dinner table. that disintegration should spill through the throat not the teeth. baba houses a symphony between his molars, smacks fishbones across his lips. he robs the rest of you of noise. don’t you hate it? even in the crevices of your blood he must assert his hook-necked dominance. rice burns a city in his tongue. in your mouth you churn gristle slowly, pulse mashup snaking through your ears. you do not breathe as you eat - is this his doing or yours? the tofu gargles traffic through his orifices. his cheerfulness is the color of egg yolk. this is too much for you, and you excuse yourself from the dinner table.
here is the woman speaking on cough:
the rattle patters up your forearms and still you cannot turn away. before mama’s bed you want to press yourself into her lungs, swallow the mucus she breathes, slather this bloodied harvest of kleenexes over each breath. her mattress is more sweat than memory. you think of the deaths you never saw, grandmas to the great great great coiling their exhales around drowning lungs, dust-choked air. you think of grandpa’s chest of cigarettes, ribs of charcoal. you wish you could hold him and her and all the other hers, cradle the stubborn bones of a single gasp. instead you tell mama you will get her some more water.
Ana Chen
here is the woman speaking on heartbeat:
press your finger to your cheek. listen. funneled swollen through one dimple, bone channel radio code. blood embroidered as metronome. it thrums hollow in canyons of dead skin, bass testament to the grunts of the fathers, the grief-skewered giggles of the mothers. in the silence between two beats your breath slides white hands around your ears. in the silence you pour yourself out of your fingers, back down your throat. you feel this silence thumbprinting your third eye, teeth tender over your brow. you don’t know when you trusted yourself to these shattered tides.
here is the woman speaking on footstep:
in the night your brother slops down the stairs, bones in a bag in a storm of skin of wood. toes crash cannoning against banister, chest before legs before gravity. the footstep is the prayer against falling. in time you will scream through baba’s carpet slippers, bury foam in the cemetary you call soles as the floor finally regurgitates itself, pulls its viscera from its lungs, crawls to the basement to die. the footstep is four if you count the whiplash of flip-flop on heel, if you worship the echoes of your grandfather’s feet. but you do not kneel and yeye grovels on dust and even your father cannot slap shame into you. as you walk away your steps are silent.
here is the woman speaking on chewing:
it is my belief that noise is uninvited to the dinner table. that disintegration should spill through the throat not the teeth. baba houses a symphony between his molars, smacks fishbones across his lips. he robs the rest of you of noise. don’t you hate it? even in the crevices of your blood he must assert his hook-necked dominance. rice burns a city in his tongue. in your mouth you churn gristle slowly, pulse mashup snaking through your ears. you do not breathe as you eat - is this his doing or yours? the tofu gargles traffic through his orifices. his cheerfulness is the color of egg yolk. this is too much for you, and you excuse yourself from the dinner table.
here is the woman speaking on cough:
the rattle patters up your forearms and still you cannot turn away. before mama’s bed you want to press yourself into her lungs, swallow the mucus she breathes, slather this bloodied harvest of kleenexes over each breath. her mattress is more sweat than memory. you think of the deaths you never saw, grandmas to the great great great coiling their exhales around drowning lungs, dust-choked air. you think of grandpa’s chest of cigarettes, ribs of charcoal. you wish you could hold him and her and all the other hers, cradle the stubborn bones of a single gasp. instead you tell mama you will get her some more water.
Stiletto
Chaim Durst
Stiletto
The Phone’s turned off.
The lights are out.
My word-hoard’s exhausted.
I’m huddled in the last
Chamber of my mind
Still oxygenated by
Your love.
I’m afraid I can’t lock
The darkness out much longer;
No, I’m certain of it.
Hold my hand
And drown with me.
Chaim Durst
Stiletto
The Phone’s turned off.
The lights are out.
My word-hoard’s exhausted.
I’m huddled in the last
Chamber of my mind
Still oxygenated by
Your love.
I’m afraid I can’t lock
The darkness out much longer;
No, I’m certain of it.
Hold my hand
And drown with me.
Tiger Balm
Kelsey Chen
1.
There is a particular kind of haunting
that happens in fiber-glass cables under the sea,
but that is another kingdom, not mine--
my genealogy has no atlantis.
The cloud is the residence of the intermittently forsaken
because there is something strange and comforting
in the insistent aching of censored characters and
pornographic punctuation,
something that
lingers, I think, in ones and zeros
and the empty frames of matrices
that are not so different from the empty frames of a Chinatown fenced and eaten, land speculation a carnivorous thing that drove us away for parking lots and towers that are knocked down by airplanes gone askew in their continental pathways.
Our promised land is, after all,
a distillation of yawns, piss, and tears that never made it to the ocean,
where the pixel is a discrete unit and there is no need for
something as complex as
pain because the incense has been
burnt and
our ancestors are already mourning.
There is no need for something called forgiveness
when all this has been said, and more,
in an infinity of self-replicating digits
that grieve in silence across the pacific.
2.
fill in the blank:
______ your sadness.
A. 洗掉
B. 吃
C. murder
D. all of the above
I cannot circle the right answer if
you do not know what it means.
The lines of my palm are a polynomial function
and an old man told me you will never escape your oscillating body
even if the oceans are drained.
3.
I wonder what would happen if you put a candle in a black hole. Some sort of vortex would emerge, I imagine, an implosion of light particles that travel in chiasmatic orbits.
4.
On the left side of my ribs I have tattooed the Chinese characters 革命.This means “revolution.” In China this phrase carries an intractable stigma—the characters call to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the mass murder and destruction that came with it. So I am careful to keep it covered when I walk the streets of Beijing. This is also the reason why, when my parents first saw the ink on my ribs, they paled the same shade of the flour that sits in our kitchen cabinet. What do you mean by this, child? they asked me. They asked what are you waiting for? I said I don’t know. I don’t know.
革命 is a strikingly beautiful phrase that does not betray the horror of its historical application. In one sense it means revolution. In another, it means to put your life on the line. In one sense I want a political revolution. The sort that will instantly and tracelessly wipe this world of its wounds. But that kind of revolution can never, will never, happen. In another sense, I want to put my life on the line. In every moment, a revolution. A personal, small revolution.
I am waiting for a revolution, I think. That’s what I might be waiting for.
I am waiting for the future, I think. In each moment. That’s what I might be waiting for.
Yesterday a friend told me they were born on the cusp of revolution. I asked which revolution. He said the cusp of revolution is the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, silly. Not a real revolution.
I, too, was born on the cusp of Revolution. Not the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, but a real revolution. I was born at a time of my mother’s revolt. But my birth quickly quelled that rebellion. Like a tide, I washed out onto the hospital bed and like a tide, the revolution washed over and out of her.
That was my inheritance.
Not our inheritance.
The first thing we do when we come into the world is wound our mothers. In order to come into life we must first indelibly wound our mothers. That is a pattern that is then continued for the rest of our lives. We continually wound our mothers, our parents, the ones that love us. With our unintentional carelessness with our bodies and words. We are all just kids.
We do not realize that a cut on our body could murder our parents, so we play and we fall again and again and again. And they are not there to catch us every time but they are always there to see the aftermath. They are always there to nurse the wound, oblivious of the fact that it has not healed, no, it has only transferred from body to body, with love.
Genealogical transmittance is bidirectional. That, we should never forget.
Kelsey Chen
1.
There is a particular kind of haunting
that happens in fiber-glass cables under the sea,
but that is another kingdom, not mine--
my genealogy has no atlantis.
The cloud is the residence of the intermittently forsaken
because there is something strange and comforting
in the insistent aching of censored characters and
pornographic punctuation,
something that
lingers, I think, in ones and zeros
and the empty frames of matrices
that are not so different from the empty frames of a Chinatown fenced and eaten, land speculation a carnivorous thing that drove us away for parking lots and towers that are knocked down by airplanes gone askew in their continental pathways.
Our promised land is, after all,
a distillation of yawns, piss, and tears that never made it to the ocean,
where the pixel is a discrete unit and there is no need for
something as complex as
pain because the incense has been
burnt and
our ancestors are already mourning.
There is no need for something called forgiveness
when all this has been said, and more,
in an infinity of self-replicating digits
that grieve in silence across the pacific.
2.
fill in the blank:
______ your sadness.
A. 洗掉
B. 吃
C. murder
D. all of the above
I cannot circle the right answer if
you do not know what it means.
The lines of my palm are a polynomial function
and an old man told me you will never escape your oscillating body
even if the oceans are drained.
3.
I wonder what would happen if you put a candle in a black hole. Some sort of vortex would emerge, I imagine, an implosion of light particles that travel in chiasmatic orbits.
4.
On the left side of my ribs I have tattooed the Chinese characters 革命.This means “revolution.” In China this phrase carries an intractable stigma—the characters call to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the mass murder and destruction that came with it. So I am careful to keep it covered when I walk the streets of Beijing. This is also the reason why, when my parents first saw the ink on my ribs, they paled the same shade of the flour that sits in our kitchen cabinet. What do you mean by this, child? they asked me. They asked what are you waiting for? I said I don’t know. I don’t know.
革命 is a strikingly beautiful phrase that does not betray the horror of its historical application. In one sense it means revolution. In another, it means to put your life on the line. In one sense I want a political revolution. The sort that will instantly and tracelessly wipe this world of its wounds. But that kind of revolution can never, will never, happen. In another sense, I want to put my life on the line. In every moment, a revolution. A personal, small revolution.
I am waiting for a revolution, I think. That’s what I might be waiting for.
I am waiting for the future, I think. In each moment. That’s what I might be waiting for.
Yesterday a friend told me they were born on the cusp of revolution. I asked which revolution. He said the cusp of revolution is the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, silly. Not a real revolution.
I, too, was born on the cusp of Revolution. Not the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, but a real revolution. I was born at a time of my mother’s revolt. But my birth quickly quelled that rebellion. Like a tide, I washed out onto the hospital bed and like a tide, the revolution washed over and out of her.
That was my inheritance.
Not our inheritance.
The first thing we do when we come into the world is wound our mothers. In order to come into life we must first indelibly wound our mothers. That is a pattern that is then continued for the rest of our lives. We continually wound our mothers, our parents, the ones that love us. With our unintentional carelessness with our bodies and words. We are all just kids.
We do not realize that a cut on our body could murder our parents, so we play and we fall again and again and again. And they are not there to catch us every time but they are always there to see the aftermath. They are always there to nurse the wound, oblivious of the fact that it has not healed, no, it has only transferred from body to body, with love.
Genealogical transmittance is bidirectional. That, we should never forget.
Narrative #1
Trang Le
Cigarettes and coffee. My relics of yesterday. Something cracks its way out.
Your polish on my broken nail beds. Stained purple. I lay half asleep to dream.
The wind continues to whistle. I dance under the umber sky. I wait for winter.
Trang Le
Cigarettes and coffee. My relics of yesterday. Something cracks its way out.
Your polish on my broken nail beds. Stained purple. I lay half asleep to dream.
The wind continues to whistle. I dance under the umber sky. I wait for winter.