Inside me, I write by Ching In Chen

Inside me, I write                     

                                                            a swarm of ants

to trace our names sweet                                  disarranging and scattering      

across sky         who will follow,                                    what’s been gathered

if not you, bright star?                          

Who will ask our questions:                   my assembled cloth and scissors                       

What is the music of the bone?                          a desert already built on final map        

                                    before instructions

What do you place in between us and why?        before “Glossary of Haunting” planted in xxx’s

I turn down the night again at her calling.

                                                            my fish searching for stars

I shut myself down at the seam.

---

Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American hybrid writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic and recombinant (winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as the chapbooks how to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award). Chen is also co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets. www.chinginchen.com