suffering from breathing. Each morning,
wake to see what swallowed
by accident in dream state – crooners,
crooked veins, angry-faced sun, fermented
watermelon rind, non-pristine tennis ball
spit out by dog.

Trees pulled
themselves into formation protecting
sun with no memory.
Bright outside
window not listening to today’s ruffled world

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