chi writes poetry
21 posts in this topic.
-
I just remembered this existed, happy 2026
-
01.03.2026 - "so, what are you gonna do post-grad?"
I wake up and decide I am half you,
half empty of everything;
I was absentminded in SoHo;
I memorized the cadence of your city girl heart,
dodging your coffee like the severed, writhing
tail of a gecko; we are all learning, all growing;
on the drive back home, Brooks told me
all about Shangri-La
(you can't find that on a map);
I took the wrong turn and hit a deer,
bone sticking out in a rare way, as though
someone had stitched an ancient ceramic head
onto its body; your mother gave me an evil-eye bead
to dangle from my rearview mirror once,
when we had first started dating;
Brooks asks me, in his big New York voice,
if I see my future in the dead kids at Kent State;
I drink my tea lukewarm because I hate
the taste of coffee. -
01.22.2026 - you have to believe life is more than the sum of its parts
it takes a long time to scrub off the clay;
under the ac unit, I duck my head like a Czech beggar.
Jade knows I know she knows it.
she was so unlike me
on that park bench, scratching at purposeless limbs
while I spit on the ground - retribution, I say,
I leave parts of me everywhere!
if love is supposed to sniff you out like a bloodhound,
then it better be like this: loose-elbowed, no qualms
about the consequences of a large vocabulary.
fingers up, towards the floodlights,
everything a halo, I want her to watch me
call myself a poet. I want love to, too. -
I love your re-occurring muse of pondering what it means to "be a poet" and to know oneself as a "poet" this last poem's play with language and and imagery and double-meaning is so rich with different directions and meanings. Always a treat to read.
-
<3
getting this out of the way now because I know I'll forget
01.27.2026 - that's why she hates me
for what it is worth, when they catch me outside,
i've got paint all over my boots
it all starts to feel surface level
how many times can you feign ignorance
over postmodern tea or some wicker chair professional
(you'd say how you know that word makes me shiver;
the rough of bodies coralled on the corner
made us drink our own sweat)
if they ask me why i do it,
i will say
ART SHOULD BE FREE;
we borrowed each other’s lungs
to feel like everyone, always, at once -
02.04.2026 - Gabriel told me that when we die our lives really do flash before our eyes
i.
your favourite song
on loop at my usual diner last night.
bloodshot eyes,
struggling to swallow down
tiramisu and
bile.
ii.
drawings of you taped up on my bedroom walls.
your pencil-sketched single-star eyes
turned away from mine.
the smell of you stuck in the edge of my left lung.
tacked to my mirror is the piece of paper
with your lipstick that i cut for you
at the café by your house.
iii.
the night three years ago
when my mother told me nothing good will ever happen to me.
every street in this city somehow walking me back to you.
you, in my dream, waiting at the bus stop like in the video
we shot for my class last term.
iv.
when i thought i fell into the sea.
v.
when i thought i fell somewhere a quintillion miles
beneath from this planet into some distant galaxy
where there's no orion, no vela and no moons, no horizons:
nothing but me in the center of it all. -
won't be around next week. doing it now. how terrible of me.
02.09.2026 -
asbestos in the rafters,
your name sticks to the walls
like a summer crush, or mold:
this season, a second skin for dead things,
you litter me with the stench of sweat
and your mother’s geraniums.
I am conscious of the way
you untuck your shirt from your jeans,
unhand yourself a white studded belt
as if the button of your pants could contain
the spirit or unleash something beautiful
inside of it. your drains
keep unearthing my pores,
creeping into wicked skin while
ammonia sprouts and lets me in,
an item worth receiving.
dingy crimson carpet unfurls,
as does your hair, and it is a new year’s
ball drop with the same gravity of thirty feet
of air whooshing past.
do you think about that sound
every so often like the cold wet air
as you plummet, then go?
the wind whistles through us like breath
on a bottle rim, and you are skipping
stones on me; you say
that I am cruel because
I have written about it
all.
(for Gabriel. you're dead now, but man, you were real. it was real. I'm glad we existed together here for a little while.) -
02.17.2026 - somewhere in California, Jade reads Frantz Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth"
winter again,
and I liken myself to the blade
upon Lucretia's breast.
she and I split turkey sandwiches
on the courthouse steps in December,
sunlight needling through
the now-blighted sycamores.
"savages!" you say, "good thing
you're a poet because you'd be
the world's
worst hunter."
your shoulder was a warm grammar
against mine. we conjugated
the afternoon in the first person plural:
we eat until we are sated,
we rest until our sun rises over our horizon,
we own the hour of this day among many,
we dirty ourselves with the flesh
of another.
you think
you can hide all of what you’ve
stolen from me beneath your head,
almost as if you were asleep
or simply ignorant.
"I have wandered for a long time and I am coming back to the deserted hideousness of your sores.” -- Aimé Césaire, "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land" -
02.24.2026 - young without wilderness
I am sitting in a laundromat watching the heavy, wet rotation of a stranger's wool blankets, feeling the gravity of a black-and-white face melted into the linoleum. there is a specific kind of sweat that only comes from a heavy coat worn indoors. I watch the shadows of the blinds stretch across the tiles like the ribcage of a whale. -
losing track of time, has it been a week? idk, who cares
03.02.2026 - that is what the buttons on your flannel are for
I want to be a deep
sea coral at the bottom of
a Norwegian fjord:
the great expanse of ice spirals,
a rhythm to my swaying
protected by the pressure
of a bear hug water column.
nobody will find me there
except she who poured out
from inlets around Greenland
just to seek my warmth
and feel the walls of my branchlets
which are navigated like dirt
roads in the Midwest, like oranges
and taste buds. -
03.09.2026 -
you
build tributaries for gravity.
don't let this world, with its
smug disapproval of tesla and reich,
demand a full fledged eclipse
of your hair, the arterial extension
of your crown chakra. many
avian predators will create
ripples in your
continuum.
vladimir lenin was able to
come to terms with his
heritage, right there in st. petersberg,
right there in burma, right there
in pontus, right there in zaire.
as pompey felt
the velcro snap from his spine
when the swords went in,
he cried the same words that caesar
would a few years later. he said
"i gave your father my finest figs
and cheeses!” the nile flooded low
that season, but across the sea in sicily,
the lasagna piled high. -
03.16.2026 - it is like that time Frank O'Hara wrote the line 'I am the least difficult of men'
when I receive Frank O’ Hara in mornings over coffee
rolling off your tongue and into a black roasted cloud,
I smell even the greyest of overcasts;
March sixteenth, two thousand twenty six,
Monday. it is jacket weather. I woke up at five o'clock
and watched the garbage truck pass.
caramel latte at 6:30, but I slept
head-cocked until then on a love seat.
I ran a mile and the risk
of blisters last night, Sunday.
I prefer callouses textured like sand dunes,
the ones Frank O'Hara slept on. I tried
to gently touch her neck, but I could only grasp her frets.
your favourite restaurant had tables beneath
three hundred dollar parasols that looked like ashtrays
and gas station fountain drink spill trays,
but I still sat beneath them. -
03.27.2026 -
we, she and I, glided up Johnson Street toward anywhere packed with reason and meaning, travel-wrung after hours of work and play like characters in a Greek tragicomedy. I sat behind the barricade between the street, the bar, and the park overlooking that glistening pause-asterisk of water. we were alone with the city, and the city was alone with us.
trailing behind, I could’ve sworn I saw you signaling for the rest of your entourage to approach more slowly, as if the city were to be won from the Mongol horde at Baghdad’s eastern gate in A.D. 1258. somewhere between the little eyelid movies drizzling through my mind, she would shiver to the beat of our escapist sentiments, and exclaim, "this is the only version of us that’s actually real!" -
05.06.2026 - strange powers
when I put a woman in a poem,
a poet wrote to me saying that women
don’t do that.
here is a story:
there are some beasts that love nothing.
in many ways, I am the memory my wife has of writing;
it doesn’t last any longer in her notebook
than it takes me to look at it.
I am still hurt by the art that you hate. -
05.13.2026 - vert-de-gris
I thought of you by the railings on the Pont de Sully,
where the Seine looked like hammered tin in Mays before
I had known you. I am oxidizing, shifting colour
like a gumball machine mood ring.
all afternoon, the city kept folding in on itself:
awning to rainwater, tire to gutter,
pigeon foot to cigarette foil,
my thumb to the place in my pocket where my phone
had warmed itself into a small animal's burrow.
Gabriel bought a pear from a man who called him
monsieur twice and me nothing at all.
I did not know yet how many versions of myself
would arrive too late for you,
to point at my chest and mean:
here.
when Gabriel asks what I like in a woman, I say:
"when she is green for me."
the locked jaw of Notre-Dame
must've been holding the sky in place.
Sign in to reply to this topic.
Delete this post?
Are you sure you want to delete this post? This cannot be undone.