chafing necks, you brushed the sea monkeys out of my leg hairs flooded the toilet bowl with Girl Scout ginger snaps pitching circus tents in my bathroom using my toothpaste and two fingers as a soupy protest against my swinging savior complex
i. i want to dye my hair poison pink call myself a carnation sitting in an aspirin bath waiting to be dressed in cellophane
i want to teach you how to look for street lights and turning cars to garnish sentences with soapy curse words
ii. this morning her foot was bruised and swelling the fleshy melon leaves in the backyard were yellowing downstairs, my grandfather was scrambling eggs quietly a green vein coated in skin like ivy in the woodwork this was a murder scene
september 27, 2017
i.“ happy birthday. growing up so quickly!” ii.“ i need to be up in three hours. that’ s cinematic.” iii.“ the paint is melting off of the walls, but seventeen is going to be ok.. seventeen is going to be the final recovery. seventeen will be children on swing sets going at incalculable speeds. seventeen will be an underexposed photograph and a loose heart string. seventeen will be a broken furnace pumping cold air and gas into the classroom” iv.“ i think that i was the one who broke the street lamp. it was just dangling there like a lifeless limb this morning, lights still flickering between red and green. this is a street light of lost consent.” v.“ last weekend, we saw a growing ceiling and made up new constellations. i was sitting on the corner of broadway and lafayette trying to clean up the new sacrilegious language when a bus ran straight through a telephone pole – splitting it down the spine. this was when we realized that words in the language can just be lost, even when clearly written on the page …”
in the summer, my grandfather grew tomatoes and melons in our backyard to have a backyard garden in the middle of New York City … what a thought … My grandmother stares out of the window with her bowl of oats like a child there are some things in this household that will never change the clutter in the corner incense burning in the altar but you know … I want to change in monumental ways in every scripted teenage movie ever, a protagonist can just pack their lives away between my retinas for two hours and come back out a totally different person so here I am. Seventeen. With a lot of growing up to do. And a plan. An outline. There are parties to go to and sleep to be lost there are beaches to walk on in the winter and conversations at this age that will never silence
one day, he could drop out of fashion school and become a quantum physicist somewhere special to prove the theory of parallel universes to say that the ambulances sang silent prayers to the dancing rubber men when the wives and sisters lie silently in the street and the towers are falling, it will be like sitting on the hood of your scooter with fingers around my neck like a garrote wire sometimes i am here trying to find a home in him and hear the sounds of palms touching in a brotherly handshake sequence, the sounds of deriving math equations unsent messages # 4“ i am i get asked if i’ m doing this for drugs. three years ago, i may have done so … but not anymore sister. now, i play bass and beatbox for my daughters.”“ there are so many ways to make toast. you can put it in a toaster oven, or one of those conveyor belt toasters … you know when you see that piece of bread fall into the horizon and come back a perfectly tanned square... maybe even one of those vertical toasters that you see in the movies. just don’ t get your head stuck in the toaster. leave it for the poets.”“ that song makes me feel everything that is happening or has happened. i feel like i just lived a million lives that were not even my own.”“ my testing room smelled like pumpkin spice and there were fake orange leaves everywhere. it was like an allexperience, seasonally appropriate, guidance counselor office poster.”“ i periodically forget that he exists.”“ you can’ t keep using buffy the vampire slayer as your moral compass …” tooth
ache poems by kelly chen
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