Kirsten Shu-ying Chen: Where Does that Leave Us?
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Day at the beach
If you stare at a seagull dead in the eyes
It’ll back down from yr bag of chips.
If you stare the horizon long enough
All yr wishes come true.
Grandmothers come back to bodysurf.
A helicopter descends, delivering ice cream.
Little boys are not so vicious.
And the flags: salt licked and frantic.
How can anybody handle it?
Some days are every gust of wind yet a breeze.
Others are cumulus - no, stop - lemon-ice,
two rainbow sailboats and everybody bailing,
never right-side-up at the right time.
And where does that leave us?
At mid-tide in the evening with nothing to do
But catch frogs in white-green wooden rows.
Running and running and running until
Stop. Hold its whole body in yr hand.
Feel its whole body breathe.
Increments of blue
I.
Take your postcard sunset.
I’ll keep my mythic ocean, world of zooids
and indigos, small poisons submerged
and cradled—on one side
by a century,
and on every other
by the space the years crave.
Air pockets of forgiveness
rising.
The denseness
given sway.
II.
Violin string from the milk of a goat!
Do you think the animal has any idea?
Its silken threads, by nature, born of a belly of song.
I put one ear to the firm ground and listen through each season.
III.
I wake up and wonder:
Is today about dying or being in love?
I look to the sky:
A galaxy with a smaller galaxy in its grip.
A body moving through a body,
speeding apart, and away, but likely
to collide again.
Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is an NYC-based poet & writer. She was a finalist for the Autumn House Press chapbook prize in poetry, a semi-finalist for the GRIST Pro Forma contest and shortlisted for both PANK's Little Book Contest and the Disquiet International Literary Prize. Read her work or say hello at kirstenshuyingchen.com
