Words and photograph by: Michelle Chen
Michelle Chen’s work invents a new way of speaking stark emotional truths. Her images and the music of her language challenge the reader at every turn, asking us to confront the difficult while we celebrate whatever beauty we can find…
The Leper’s Manifesto
First, are you infected?
Have you slipped
a lonely African Grey
into your mouth
and inherited its plucked feathers,
self-mutilation?
Did you keep it there
through origin and tide
tonguing the mottled
shores of its weeping,
the blue skin of a Parcheesi
elephant loosing a god?
Have you flattened
your nose, lips, teeth
between raspy pages
pressed and preserved
a handful of rusted dahlias
scraping for a bit of spark?
Yes, no, maybe
so be it.
Believe me, the antibiotics
lurch like wildebeest
across the vaulted diaries
and depressor sticks
of moonflower doctors. These
moonflower doctors will try
cough drops, dew drops, suction
cups to lead you through fields
of greening bronze hands pointing
towards the rotted skin of Bethlehem.
The colonies will be brutal. Wisteria
will run a fever from a single glance
at your cracked surface, the dunes
shocked hideous by your old
age. Bats will shriek, fly
terrible acres away.
Unfurl your roll of barbed
wire and crumble a bit of food
for your limp lips
to brush. Settle down
in the bottom bunk
and let the sickly wood
groan your dreams.
Sailor, the black jeweled turtle
looped around your neck
will not let go. Leper spelled
backwards is, after all,
repel.
You are thirsty.
Your family will wonder
what they have done wrong.
Stop crying.
Raise your palm and transform
into the loping wildness of Easter,
your shattered nerves threading
spring through your
permanent sores and bunions
in the hour when dung beetles
drag their portable ugliness
against the sky, companionship
with their heavenly dirt.
You want a face like your own.
The bird has never left.
Maps
Against the paper, my fingers thrum
like pidgin languages.
Mountainous flesh on my
knuckles
and a cavernous fingernail
repeats
my hopeful cartography.
My Seven-Eleven is a hot spring, a bubbling geyser
where cracked roads meet.
In winter
at the gas station
an icicle hangs from the sign
like the needle of a compass.
My mother’s bathtub
crackles like old paper
sixty gallons of water
from the steel faucet,
three inches of liquid nitrogen
from chemistry class,
the blow of collision
frothing into the air.
Maps
shredding apart
in frozen orientation
piled and blurred
like morning fog.
When I show my mother
the cold bathtub
her topography changes, her eyes are scaled back
fewer inches per mile, and quietly
she begins to rain
so that I must thaw for a few hours
the plugged shower
and toss the wet pieces
into the kitchen bag
besides blackened orange peels,
plastic trays of frozen meat projecting
the last contours of bloodied towns.
Twelve winters ago,
trains drew equators
at the subway station.
Inside, people sat bunched,
labeling the frigid air.
I hit,
they yelled.
Underneath the subway guide
glass grew like fields of grass
onto a glacial map.
Parallax
At the far end of the row
the enthusiast discusses stellar death
like my runaway father.
He is happy
to compare himself to giants
happier soon after
to dwarf.
The lower the mass
the more slowly the star consumes its fuel
the longer it lives.
Wherever he is
It’s not right!
He’s away
unstable shells expanding
on a ribbon of hot gas
for within the Orion Nebula
we can observe stars
both within the act of formation
and destruction.
But if two old sunlike stars collide
they can fuse together
to form a single star
with twice the mass.
In another line of sight
a shaving tool
beneath fluorescent lights
on glittering pond
And as the teacher speaks
he folds like radar
at the end of the land
strung out
in a dense globular cluster
waiting
to be born again
a face in a childless crowd.
Michelle Chen is a fifteen-year old poet, writer, and artist who lives for paper mail, warm zephyrs, and fried noodles, and who takes inspiration for her writing from the events that occur in and around her home, New York City, though her birthplace is Singapore and she hopes to return and visit someday. She is the first-prize winner of the 2015 Knopf Poetry prize, the recipient of The Critical Junior Poet’s Award, and has performed at Lincoln Center. Her work has been honored both regionally and nationally in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is forthcoming in the Sharkpack Poetry Review, Corium, Ember, and Night Train.
