Ching-In Chen
If I had been asked when I first started writing how gender informs my work, I would have said -- that's easy. I identify as a woman and I write. That's how my gender informs my work. But I've learned from my writing over the years that my understanding of myself and the world around me shifts and transforms (often through the process of writing). These poems are about my exploration of what I've received (from my family, from the society I grew up in and live in, from the community I surround myself with on a daily basis) -- and what I accept, what I think about, what I push against and even what may change from one moment to the next in terms of my ever-shifting gender identity.
Praisesong for Sisters
You asked me for the street littered with glass. I didn't want to give. You
I know my history of madness and how to feed it
said, you're the one
like the day I ate my scabs
doing them a disservice, these sisters. These tendrils
to write a poem about it
in place of dust. Blessings
not an impulse
for a sirensongwail
i pulled
blazing out of crust
the rust
you know what's there
there mice
there boots
there a million legs
licked my open elbow
matches marching to consumption
fat and searing
we'll light them up and burn the little bugs
This is what you want so eat.
Leftover
Mother, a matching smock, blue
without pockets.
With the leftover fabric, she
made me one
that lived in my closet
with my scraps of yellow
paper, the watching teen-mag
eyes, a frilly prom dress
lined with flutes.
She would return from
second shift, singing
for a dead daughter. After
I shaved my hair down
to the nubs, she would look
at the broken
television
when she addressed me.
“You look like a boy,”
she said to the bright static.
I let the voice
from the TV speak
for me -- “I will not apologize
for respecting a woman's
right to choose” - and pressed
my lips to her
blue shoulder.
Then, I placed a thumb
on the stiff blue, wanting.
She sighed; the TV clapping
a million hands.
In the decade
before, I believed I would escape,
before the choked-down,
the piss, the groaning
corrector of grammar, the stink
sewn, the inside of her wrist.
But that was before
my father, asleep and drunk
in his own soup, two days
abandoned on the white carpet, called
for an absent wife
who had trundled a broken
suitcase onto the Chinatown
bus and fled.
I do not blame her; this is not my story.
For the Girl Who Nearly Broke Me
after Barbara Jane Reyes
Six months after we tried to poison each other, you pack your father into the crumbling suitcase. His skin slippery, uneasy to fold, sweat sparking mold in the pockets.
In another boarding house, I flush memories down the toilet, especially that flame-colored bird we passed between our mouths after we drank what we shouldn't and never surfaced again.
There is no connection, except a friend, unwitting intermediary who brings a borrowed, unasked-for suitcase to the shove-off.
I open the front flap to your eyes grown thirty more years, your face exerting grease, the green stubble cradling your mountain cheekbone – and reach for your empty shoulders, shaking with all my might.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic and a multi-genre, border-crossing writer. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is a Kundiman, Macondo and Lambda Fellow. A community organizer, she has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston. Her work has been recently published in BorderSenses, Rio Grande Review, Chroma, Sous Rature, Cha, Verdad and others.