Ching-In Chen
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button for mrs. bettner’s houseboy
Some nights
kitchen sink, drainboard.
A refilled pantry. four white Eighth and Ninth
Main fire landlords
Orange Street hoses
lit Stove
Each number perched leave
to her command.
She presses within sixty days
line, lights a room gutted
which holds her body.
8- parlor. A cup of tea. hydrants
6 – bathroom. Never rung. A lady’s private – keep volatile
stories in my closet, waiting for free pools of oil legal
day. anti-Chinese holiday
All these years, jewelry box shines.
Outhouse mine. I know tea leaves, how they drain. Cyclone consumes sacrifice
Gramophone. Her dead
boycott
son’s portrait glower from parlor. Other one shunts trophies on cheap armed
second floor. Everything in this house has a useless double.
Shutters onto balcony with no entrance.
Whist ladies marvel at spider militia
driven out of
hamlet
no alien can fish
dangle from his neck.
If guest stays, a fancy magazine holder. Black
lacquer next to where hand push.
jabbing
Your book, Story of a Great Nation effigy in the ribs
[Chinese workers in orange groves], a legislative war
stays on shelf.
sentence lover dreams fragment queen
Raid night, she pull up
night market
figroll transaction my fruit stand, first and ready,
family recipe sisters knive with chortling quarters. I take them into hand, consider
scatter only inheritance after deep sea crossing each one as if my child. She
drown parents no attic parchment accumulate stands close a shiver, grin up into
me no potato peeling gather scrawled and close as I count out the sweet things.
Then the sirens and she not in the mood. She
usually
try to mouth story and we needed a long pull, after Jose Lee
all-night vowels
and Jimmy.
she want me understand her attraction to full sentences
explain to fragment queen Her brother through the fire of van shook arms out for
cuffs.
She drape back into shoulders,
why she wants you end-stop, wait out night.
We sleep on tarmac and I miss already.
treasure pot bottom
In morning, clear skies and empty soup bowl.
make monks jump wall into meaty sea
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Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press) and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press; AK Press) and Here is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press). A Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole and Callaloo Fellow, they are part of the Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A senior editor of The Conversant, they serve on the Executive Board of Thinking Its Presence: Race, Advocacy, and Solidarity in the Arts. They are an Assistant Professor in Poetry at Sam Houston State University and poetry editor of the Texas Review. www.chinginchen.com.