Personal History
I didn't really know
my grandmother, I
realize, when
the teacher sets
us loose into
the cauldron of
our memories.
She probably
sat in the cramped,
dusty kitchen, chewing
her noodles,
like the other grandmas.
She was famed
for fire tossing,
says my mother,
but only
when I ask. Nobody taught my mother anything.
I abandon her
creaky body, wrapped
loose in a diaper, housed
in a moving steel cage, last time I saw her
and go to help my mother rinse the spinach four times.
Her bulldog face, her shirt of earth, already swimming in the dirt.
My grandfather
I see
at the table, bent
over, almost crouching,
creased,
with a magnifying
glass for the characters
in the newspaper.
In the dark,
waiting to catch whoever
goes by in an act of
insolence.
In my memory, he is always proper and trimmed.
But now newly
whiskered, grieving
over a woman I don't know,
this patriarch
ticks in the corner, waiting his turn.
Memory in Water, Twins
That day's egg into the brine of the saltpan. I hold my memory in water.
Sun tossed me off the slough. The sky searches for me down in the spit of bacon. Ring of wooden coffee, your smile again.
I separate my blood from your oily thirst, my tendon from your bursting skin, my sullen mud from your practical boot.
I thought you my opposite twin, dancing in tandem with our bright shoulders.
Naming each steppe, indent and grow grass among us.
You monitor me through the lipids on the screen, blinking into the night.
I wish I broke my pen on the griddle to stop production. To pull myself from the flame.
Lavish
The boat split in half, but I
did not hear its concise journey or
the moment of its lightning
reincarnation
Not wood or balm,
not wind –
I was the one in the boat, I was the blue
body, but I could not
reach the water, not roiling
through the iris,
not connected to any mouths
Swallowing the deep spit of a
fragile heart that doubts all
it knows about survival
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). 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, Riverside and Boston. She can be found at www.chinginchen.com
More information on the book here.
I didn't really know
my grandmother, I
realize, when
the teacher sets
us loose into
the cauldron of
our memories.
She probably
sat in the cramped,
dusty kitchen, chewing
her noodles,
like the other grandmas.
She was famed
for fire tossing,
says my mother,
but only
when I ask. Nobody taught my mother anything.
I abandon her
creaky body, wrapped
loose in a diaper, housed
in a moving steel cage, last time I saw her
and go to help my mother rinse the spinach four times.
Her bulldog face, her shirt of earth, already swimming in the dirt.
My grandfather
I see
at the table, bent
over, almost crouching,
creased,
with a magnifying
glass for the characters
in the newspaper.
In the dark,
waiting to catch whoever
goes by in an act of
insolence.
In my memory, he is always proper and trimmed.
But now newly
whiskered, grieving
over a woman I don't know,
this patriarch
ticks in the corner, waiting his turn.
Memory in Water, Twins
That day's egg into the brine of the saltpan. I hold my memory in water.
Sun tossed me off the slough. The sky searches for me down in the spit of bacon. Ring of wooden coffee, your smile again.
I separate my blood from your oily thirst, my tendon from your bursting skin, my sullen mud from your practical boot.
I thought you my opposite twin, dancing in tandem with our bright shoulders.
Naming each steppe, indent and grow grass among us.
You monitor me through the lipids on the screen, blinking into the night.
I wish I broke my pen on the griddle to stop production. To pull myself from the flame.
Lavish
The boat split in half, but I
did not hear its concise journey or
the moment of its lightning
reincarnation
Not wood or balm,
not wind –
I was the one in the boat, I was the blue
body, but I could not
reach the water, not roiling
through the iris,
not connected to any mouths
Swallowing the deep spit of a
fragile heart that doubts all
it knows about survival
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). 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, Riverside and Boston. She can be found at www.chinginchen.comMore information on the book here.
