Chen Chen
Of Course It’s on FaceTime That Sam Calls Me a Monster to My Face Repeatedly, Then Asks “Has Anyone Ever Called You a Monster?”
All because I said
3:30 p.m. is a bonkers time to FaceTime & 4 p.m.’s much
more reasonable & why shouldn’t I
talk about my elegant perm a bit
every day for the rest of our lives & it’s July & I’ve been utterly
behind since last July & I’m definitely still
writing the wrong year sometimes month but I always ask
if the day of the week is right
though who the hell cares I do god do I care
I mean I don’t give a shit if I’m deeply understood
or genuinely likable but I need to be
lovable I write to be lovable I write I rewrite I say Read my poems
to be loved & not my poems’ me love me
not my words love this person with this face
& this name & this chin & this need & this upside-down wishful
wistfulness & this memory & that
pet fish & these Tuesdays & these moods & these tootsies & these
shirts & those little embroidered flowers & these
bits of hair
on my shirt shoulders & my mother cutting my hair & my mother
who cut my hair till I was fifteen & full of rage & both
of us were & different reasons & similar
rage & she was so lonely & I was so lonely & so those haircuts grew
into memory & the snips & strands on the concrete what
was it a sitting area outside our apartment & it was
late summer late afternoon & later she would
cut the watermelon too & all the juice on the counter & all the hurt
she said & did & could’ve & didn’t & wept & did
she did say sorry she is
doing sorry can I be done hurting do you know how
in one dream my hair was so long only she could cut it she said let me & I let her.
Love Poem with Splash & Even Splish-Splash
Jeff says he wants to be like the frogs
we spot at the pond—one’s sitting
on a lily pad, of course,
while another’s climbing a long frond, & a third’s
jumped in the water, Bashō-style.
Splash . . .
Look at them, he says, they don’t job,
they just frog—I want to just Jeff.
Join me? he asks. & I say, Duh. I’ll just Chen
from my lily pad
of an old bean bag chair. Eating my snacks,
burping my burps.
Pure existence & pretty cute, too!
Though of course just Chenning would also entail
books & reading way too much
into a character’s
mother’s name. A good
70% of just Chenning involves staring
out the bedroom window
while wearing nothing but my most melancholy sweater
as though I’m a film directed by
a perfume.
The other 70% is wondering
if Bashō ever said I want to just Bashō
or if he already did all the time. Splish-
splash—
To just Chen is to just not math.
To fully Chen is to waste
summer nights tussling with some sweet
monster of a hidden
meaning. &,
to just Jeff?
That, I’m afraid, is beyond my or even
a frog’s ability to adequately describe.
What I can say
is it includes just as much wondering,
tussling, & pretty cute prettiness,
but not
a single burp. To just Jeff
is to just never belch, to always
find my glasses under a bag or inside
a coat, to completely,
entirely bawl during Billy Elliot, to know a song
from the first few chords, occasionally
from the first few notes, yet rarely
getting the lyrics right,
to soft, to softer
lamplight, to just like that
& just like this, too,
to always, always
say sorry even when he’s not in the wrong, even when it’s
a cloud, a suddenly vile cloud
villaining over the pond,
or me, I’ve done
wrong, I’ve mangled the tune, fumbled my cool
that was never really mine, & just because I
look upset, too,
no, you
don’t need to say you’re sorry,
you just keep
just Jeffing
in every
Jeff way.