Chen Chen

Maybe the centipede in the cellar
 
 knows with its many disgusting legs
 
 why I am sad. No one else does.
 
 I don’t know why I’m sad.
 
 I want to be a sweetheart in every moment,
 
 full of goats & xylophones, as charming
 
 as a hill with a small village on it.
 
 I want to be a village full of sweethearts,
 
 as you are, every second of the day,
 
 cooking me soups & drawing me pictures
 
 & holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness,
 
 with your infinite sweetheart arms.
 
 But isn’t it true, you are not
 
 always why I am happy. & I promise
 
 it is true, you are almost never why,
 
 why I am sad. You are just
 
 in the same room with me & my unsweet,
 
 uncharming, completely
 
 uninteresting sadness. I wish it could
 
 unbelong itself from me, unstick
 
 from my face. Who invented the word
 ennui? A sad Frenchman?
 
 A centipede? They should’ve never
 
 been born. They should’ve seen me
 
 in Paris, a sad teenage
 
 exchange student. I was so sad
 
 & so teenaged, one day my host sister
 
 gripped my hand hard & even harder
 
 said, SOIS HEUREUX.
 
 BE HAPPY. & miraculously,
 
 I wasn’t sad anymore.
 
 All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister.
 
 See, I was angry in Paris, which is clearly
 
 not allowed. One can be sad in Paris (I was)
 
 & one can be in love in Paris (I was not),
 
 but angry? Angry in Paris?
 
 Now, I am in love—with you!—though sometimes
 
 terribly sad for no good reason, & not so much
 
 angry as guilty when you say to me,
 Don’t cry, don’t be sad, as if my sadness
 
 could sink this room, this apartment, this
 
 whole city not Paris. But does my sadness
 
 always need to be your sadness?
 
 I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness
 
 because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it
 
 by kissing you again & again while neither of us
 
 can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes
 
 miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss
 
 I think every single dead person
 
 in every part of the world must crave
 
 with violent impossibility. I wish I could peel
 
 all my sadness in one long strip off my skin
 
 & toss it in a bucket. No one would have to carry it.
 
 It would just sit there & be punished.
 
 It would just sit there & think about everything it’s done.

Song of the Anti-Sisyphus

for Jeff

I want to start a snowball fight with you, late at night
 
 in the supermarket parking lot. I want you
 
 to do your worst. I want to put the groceries in the car first

because it’s going to get nasty. Because I was reading today
 
 in the science section of the paper that passionate love
 
 lasts only a year, maybe two, if you’re lucky.

Because I want to be extra, extra lucky. Because the article
 
 apologized specifically to poets—sorry, you hopeless
 
 saps—as though we automatically believe in love more

than anyone else (more than carpenters, kindergarten teachers,
 
 novelists) & have been pushing this Non-Truth
 
 on everyone. Because who knows what will happen,

but I want to, baby, want to believe it’s always possible
 
 to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years,
 
 four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight

in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter
 
 inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat
 
 the unplowed street & the fog that’s been erasing

evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover
 
 it’s some giant’s lost silver blanket. I want to
 
 find the giant & return to him his treasure.

I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map
 
 drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. I want to shiver
 
 against you, into you. I want the sound

of your teeth. I want the sound of the wind. I want to be
 
 like the kids with their plastic sleds, gliding down,
 
 all the way down the hill, then trudging

their sleds & snow-suited bodies all the way
 
 back to the top. I want to be how they do this, for hours,
 
 till sunset, till some sensible someone has

to come drag them away from the snow, the slope,
 
 the 3… 2… 1!
 
 of joy. I want to be the Anti-Sisyphus, in love

with repetition, in love, in love. Foolish repetition,
 
 wise repetition. I want more hours, I want insomnia, I want
 
 to replace the clock tick with tambourines. I want to growl,

moan, whisper, grunt, hum, & howl your name.
 
 I want again & again your little dance, little booty shake
 
 in big snow boots, as I sing your name.

Chen Chen’s work appears/is forthcoming in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, [PANK], Split This Rock Poem of the Week, Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, among other places. He is a Kundiman Fellow, a University Fellow in Syracuse University’s MFA program, and a Poetry Editor for Salt Hill. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com.