Issue 2.1
Winter 2022
Ching-In Chen
Reflection
I wrote a series of poems which started with the phrase “inside me” in response to a prompt that Aliah Lavonne Tigh offered during a writing circle. I have been imagining what unusual, unlikely things could be housed inside me without me knowing, ever since I learned that my body was harboring growths unbeknownst to me. This series has been a way for me to witness my changing relationship to my body and what it harbors.
Inside me, more family
of strange blood. What
I mean – living in house
can black salt powder forgive
strained by accidents. Sun
always poking each elder
can ground cumin find raw hand
by shoulder, passing tale
spit by spit. Each mouth
trouble exhaling. Stuck
on uptake, boiling again
can turmeric stay short share
in fester of memory, in chorus
of left-behind engines.
as in where we collected
and shelved where our backs
held how did we sanitize our breath
you entered in purple
white wall in small, short house
in forest stalk among trees
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
Aliah Lavonne Tigh, Weren’t We Natural Swimmers
Kazim Ali, Silver Road
Jennifer Perrine, Again
Krista Franklin, Under the Knife
Laura Da’, Instruments of the True Measure