I’m aware of the dead’s hands on my shoulders, their shoulders torn by barbs and bottles, hands that lead but do not aid. In the blue before morning I come across you, and because I want someone to kiss me I lock eyes with you like a sickle locks wheat, like it […]
What should not stay unsaid will grow wild as chicory flowers, as the mushrooms on the damp side of a tree. In that time after sunrise but before the light hits the shore, that time animals know, my father took me in his canoe onto Greenwood Pond. Passing by Flint’s cabin and the A-frames, […]
Chen Chen offers some advice to young writers.
Chen Chen reads and talks about Kazumi Chin’s poem “The Very Last New Year’s Resolution,” from Chin’s collection Having a Coke With Godzilla.
Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick. I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought, What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor, married to lawyer. The faucet said: […]
1. I was 13 & it was night & without even knowing it, I had successfully evaded the Amherst police for 4, 5 hours. It was night & without having committed any crimes, I was pursued, looked into by the Amherst police. Well, perhaps I’d trespassed: scrambled up a […]
The trees, a madness of white & wind, we, a madness of sweat & rope, ropes of semen lassoing each other, closer— our competing, conspiring tongues, nipples, armpits, the terribly neglected inside bits of our elbows, which we’ve dubbed “bowpits,” & kiss. & my mind sometimes wanders during, but it’s OK, I’m thinking […]
Maybe the centipede in the cellar knows with its many disgusting legs why I am sad. No one else does. I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, full of goats & xylophones, as charming as a hill with a small village on it. I want to be a village full of sweethearts, as […]