Poetry 56
But, I think I was wrong before. I believed salted crackers were lacking and the smoke would make me ill and dizzy. But we fall together and asleep so easy.
Chin
I think mistook the pause between your thoughts for absence. These days I try to hold the hope in your voice, gossamer threads woven between your words. These days, all my poems are love poems.
Sam Chin ’17
I don’t know how to say: I am so grateful for the privilege you give me you save me the last piece of fruit a life filled with all the things you never had Don’t know how to say: I still flinch when you move your arm too fast Can’t tell you, I don’t sit close because I am afraid of hungry fists. Speak and don’t speak like some ghost trapped between a chinese-english dictionary. Pressed flowers between yellow pages. Hunter College in 1984 when New York was violent streets and english sounded like all the people who said you won’t make it here and Shanghai was giving up and home. I try to hold that want between my fingers the kind of american dream that tastes like hungry and caged birds. Freedom is when you learn how to want instead of need. On Christmas, I can only see the empty in all the boxes you give me. I want to explain—that capitalism is the enemy— how this money is blood money how it thins and poisons until we are all hemorrhaging. We are obsessed with the things that kill us. Every day you give me the things you always wanted piano lessons, a good education, pocket money for food but I feel like some hog to be examined and prodded
Poetry
But now, you give me peace like saltine crackers, gingerly handed to me slowly from a sleeve, one by one. I am so hungry but they are the only thing I can eat these days, anything too rich and I might vomit again.
I Don’t Know How to Say
57 Chin
I thought that you could make me better, and you told me: “Change must come from within.” I reached into my throat, searching for my uvula so that I could vomit change on the floor. Self-improvement spewed, chaos ensued. This is not what you meant.