Back to Issue Fifty-Nine

IN AN INHALE

by AVA CHEN

A little boy is always trying to claw out of my chest. I never learn
              his name; the traffic is too loud. I tell a stranger I’ll leave when the stoplight turns red
                            and turn our bodies so neither of us can see it.

              I write an autobiography for a fiction workshop.
Someone asks is the narrator dying? I open my mouth
              and everyone I have ever kissed is seized by a coughing fit.

                            I sleep talk in a language everyone knows
              but me. When I wake up, nobody tells me what I have confessed.
To break the silence at a dinner party I ask the closest person

              have you ever considered bangs? You’d look good. You really would.
                            I cannot forget their face because I do not try to remember it.
              There is a little boy that only knows how to cry around strangers.

I place my hand against another forehead as if to measure how close
              we can get without knowing what either of us truly want.
                            The towel is always damp. The air is always pregnant

              with water, with what it tries to escape. No matter how hot the shower,
I always smell like the last stranger I have stared at. The stench of a mouth
              covers every street. I think of a word—I hear it through the walls of a stranger

                            ’s bedroom—I lose a little more faith in the origin
              of things. All the evening silver does is outline bodies
I want to have happened. Over me, shadows marble,

              forget their edges. O incontinent moon. O degeneration.
                            O lack. O glutton. I inhale, keep everything
              I do not understand. I am asked at the end of a night

do you regret suffering?
              In response I throw a rock out a window as if it were my body
                            and turn away before it hits.

              We never talk to each other, only to the street between us,
which thins into a bridge, looming over empty boats
              like a husband’s coat over the affair when the wife comes home

                            early, tipsy. As the affair escapes, he thinks
              if we keep going, there will be a bedroom—in the bedroom,
a mirror—the mirror will prove our existence, but not who we are—

              by then, we will have already gone. Any act of dying as proof
                            of life. A father sacrifices for his son sacrifices
              for his son sacrifices for his—

A father idly sketches a little boy, and it is of himself,
              younger, before he knew anyone else.
                            His son cracks open the door and asks is that me?

              The father opens his mouth. The son is backlit by the hallway
lamp. The light turns red. People keep driving out of themselves
              and through each other. I wake up in a stranger

                            ’s bed, notice a line of empty bottles by shadows
              the new day casts through them. Each used
to have a name. I must believe we all used to have names.

 

 

WARP

by AVA CHEN

Stored improperly, wooden planks begin to warp.
When the curve bends even the thickest
of screws, the wood is thrown into a bucket
for middle school students
to practice carving soup spoons out of.

A woman flips over, asleep, wraps her arms
around her husband, whom she has stopped loving
long ago. In their kitchen, burnt layers
of Tuesday pasta soak in a pan,
which the husband has spent days picking away at

with a soup spoon, the least efficient
but most scratch-avoidant implement.
Outside, the end of autumn meant branches
had lost the leaves they used to mask
their twists towards each other,

under which middle school couples now look up,
pointing and giggling, and exclaim everything
in nature is proof that we are meant to be.
There is a tightness upon departure, the space
shrinking, puckering, scar tissue grown too quickly.

The man suggests having sex in the kitchen
to rekindle their marriage. The woman,
squatting on the toilet afterwards, watches
the used condom twisted in the wastebasket
the way she imagines the trees watch the children.

Unequal moisture distribution causes wood
to dry and shrink unevenly. The calcified pasta
shrivels to an island, a face, a leaf.
Sensing movement, the man embraces her
body                                                           back.
.              She holds, tighter.

 

Ava Chen is a poet and editor from Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, The Rumpus, Salt Hill, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Prizes, Bennington College, and more. Her debut chapbook, Habitual Prayer, was chosen by Danez Smith as winner of the 2023 Palette Poetry Chapbook Prize. You can find more of her work at avachen.carrd.co. She loves lemons and tomatoes and hopes you have a beautiful day.

 

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