Issue 1.2
Fall 2021
Ching-In Chen
Reflection
I wrote "breath is missing" in response to a prompt that George Abraham offered during the BIPOC Writing Party, a weekly Monday night gathering for BIPOC writers started by Faith Adiele and Serena W. Lin during the pandemic. Abraham asked us to write in a form based on Marwa Helal's poem "The Middle East Is Missing" in Invasive Species, where each stanza uses every letter in the alphabet except the letter which spells out the phrase. I have been writing about breathing in a time of disaster, our small and personal ones as well as the ones which have been grieved over publicly. This poem would not have been possible without this community which I am always looking for and finding in unexpected spaces.
breath is missing
-after Marwa Halal
​
inside me, I’ve pried my
kangaroo mouth open
cut teeth all queer xray
all zigzag and grid
not veering
to steal or wait
to queer a fresh hole
of juice
*
​
inside me, I’ve tied
each xenophobic
animal variant
all wooly and zoo
all jig and clean
as a quick bloody
flying whistle
*
​
within this body, I jam
toxic and high dolphin
fluid a racoon
king zip
your vanilla quack
*
​
inside me, sister
of high origin
flings xoxo
zing blue toe
*
​
inside me, a fluid
racks up spell
coughs error
in air we
worry for our
names wrong
and deep across
our blue kind
jamming up
queens and jokers
saying ‘no xenophobes
here! no vicious zilches
now!’
*
inside me, a family
of prefixes
takes residence
stacking bowls
and forks against
perforations and
walls always
repeating letters
arriving for justice
demanding quartz
cuts
Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. A community organizer, they have worked in Asian American communities in San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Boston, Milwaukee, Houston and Seattle.They are currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. www.chinginchen.com
Ching-In's Book Recommendations
George Abraham, Birthright
Marwa Helal, Invasive Species
Faith Adiele, The Nigerian-Nordic Girl's Guide to Lady Problems