Ching-In Chen is the author of recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017) and The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009). A Callaloo, Kundiman, and Lambda Fellow, they have been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Norman Mailer Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. An assistant professor at Sam Houston State University, they live in Houston, Texas.
poem index
occasions
- Anniversary
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- Birthdays
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themes
- Afterlife
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forms
- Abecedarian
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- Sonnet
- Tanka
- Terza Rima
- Triolet
- Villanelle
schools & movements
- Nuyorican Poetry
- Objectivists
- OULIPO
- Poets of Exile
- Romanticism
- New York School
- New Formalism
- Misty Poets
- Modernism
- Modernismo
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- Surrealism
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- Translators
- Victorian
- Metaphysical Poet
- Language Poetry
- Confessional Poetry
- Contemporary
- Cowboy Poetry
- Dark Room Collective
- Concrete Poetry
- Conceptual Poetry
- Augustan
- Beat
- Black Arts
- Black Mountain
- Ethnopoetics
- Fireside Poet
- Harlem Renaissance
- Imagism
- Jazz Poetry
- Kanaka Maoli poetry
- Futurism
- Fugitives
- First World War
- Flarf
- Formalism
- Acmeism
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related poems
- A Vision of Rest by Alexander Posey
- Saudade by John Freeman
- His Morning Meditations by Jay Parini
- Gate of Freedom by Deema K. Shehabi
- Brooding Grief by D. H. Lawrence
Simulacra
It's not that the rains have rolled back up to the ceiling. It's not that the frost has stopped flirting with the dunegrass. My mother's eyes are glass: she writes me what she sees there. Duck waddling highway, sideways raccoon pus, mutant sunflower with a yen for fertilizer. She has no time for wordshit. Her older sister tells me my mother doesn't understand much of poetry. Why am I resistant? The camera's already been here.
Copyright © 2010 by Ching-In Chen. Used with permission of the author.
Copyright © 2010 by Ching-In Chen. Used with permission of the author.
by this poet
poem
2014
The teacher straightbacked,
faced me off, her eyes.
My face in the cleave of
her shoulder, my bones
sitting high my cheek.
The word proper
arrives in the hall. The order
of things, rolling
neat into pine drawers, dead-
clean. Squeezed juice of
poem
2014
after Mendi Obadike
When I was a white girl, I had no mother.
I drank whiskey, lived in a house with no walls.
Girls visited and marveled at my room to breathe.
When it was sunny, they let down their hair, drank fresh orange juice.
We
poem
2017
To heat a sister House a burn
adjust the replica body
in the yesterday travel rain
no sister locks the door at the highest temperature
three hours still parked still comfortable to eat sugar by force
only because each2
related poems
poem
2006
***
Even if only in photographs—
a laundry truck, seconds after.
Phone in the apartment ringing
above the accident & a coroner
careful enough to stay speechless
until the wind picks up
& the passersby can smell simply
the blood, like
poem
2010
On my desk is a photograph of you taken by the woman who loved you then. In some photos her shadow falls in the foreground. In this one, her body is not that far from yours. Did you hold your head that way because she loved it? She is not invisible, not my enemy, nor even the past. I
poem
2003
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white, Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low