snow day
in your honor i’m having myself a snow day
in my snow day i’m losing myself
to a documentary about elephants’ matriarchy
in the company of elephant rituals i eat
kale & potato soup
i eat my soup till mostly, honestly i’m drinking it
in your honor i get loopy & not a little sleepy
in honor of how you don’t start your real day
till 1 pm, i nap
in honor of how you honor winter,
i get up to write by hand—the room’s only sounds
a black pen, white breath
to be honest all i can write is an astonishingly
aimless letter to my aunt
to tell the truth, despite the cold, it is snowing not
one flake
on this, my snowed-in day
in honor of your aches, i replay the doc, rewatch the elephants
in honor of your jubilations, i am the elephants’ fervent student
in horror at not knowing how much they love
each other, i return to my letter, try to make it
at least longer, making sure that once i spill
onto a second page i fill it
to the very bottom—
because what if an elephant comes or you
are hovering, would you think i’ve become
unloving, especially toward aunts
when i say your honor
i mean my grief
when i say snow day
i mean why, friend, can’t i really pretend
that you’re still here, when every day
you are
lust ode
i write for dead god & tulips still
breathing the morning in.
i pray for dead god & his stupid soul.
i pray to the stupidity of the earth still infinitely
more intelligent than i, every clump
of sweetness, every
muddy clatter of matter, every solid
strangeness & strange solidity
smelling good. i write to the hairy
scent of a mammal
right after sex. i sing so good to god’s
dead arms as they hold my vibrato
lusts. i luster
with the might of a whale
or perhaps another marine mammal
capable of such song & trust. i lust
for another sip of the smoothie i did not order
but my best friend wisely did.
by moonlight i lust
for the snail goop my bff applies goopily
to his face as the unskippable step
in his bedtime skincare routine.
in broad daylight i lust
after every page of the red, red
ren hang photobook you got me one birthday, purple
plum of a friend, thank you, for always being more
alive than god.
i lust for the wisdom of smoothies.
for plato has nothing on this philosophy
of platonic soulqueers taking giddy care.
for why isn’t everyone
talking about how soul & soil are just one
letter apart? it’s true,
i lust for my friendships,
the way they make me believe
in the soul & in the fact
that sunlight makes a sound,
one not unlike a ginormous bassoon, don’t you
hear it, too? yes,
i too lust to be less
apart from a man’s solid
song of calves & thighs. & pubes,
i lust for you, how lustlovingly i pick you from my teeth,
tongue—the sweaty
spitty lyricism of that.
i lust to double down on my divine thirst
that lusts for another poem, the next stupid tulip bursting hot holy
through every molecule of table, paper, pen, hand,
an ambassador
of the earth
who must be named lust ode
or lust song
with borrowed luster,
for example, the poet friend who said at dinner:
you keep saying supposed to, what you’re supposed
to do, but what do you want,
what is it that you want to do?
i want to do
it with my man all morning. i want to kindly
brush my teeth first. then
brush my teeth again
after—my arm, my hand
powered by postcoital zest, my soul
uncoiled by a sudden plenitude of z words
such as zirconium
& zirconias
& zinnia-
carrying friends i need to call up
right now
because i want to be
happy, i want to be happy, i want to be happy, iwanttobehappy
i want to not want to be happy but to just already be
as zingy as the earth’s morning breath
CHEN CHEN is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists.