Jostle. Fracture. Access.

A full-throated rustling at each long window. Landline with static.

My partner tells me that our connection makes me sound faint or fuzzy and often doesn’t answer the phone when I try. I could be engulfed by the forest, slowly overtaken by unnamed insects I hear but not see, who I don’t know the names of. Every day, underneath the kitchen light which hangs over the counter, tiny bodies lie. They always return no matter how often I wipe them away. I read about people who had been in the space before me and what they had done and feel I need to fill the space with other voices, other noises other than the natural order of things.

Listen to books on tape while lying in bed; leave a light on for companionship.

~

I didn’t break my ankle but I do have a resistance to circling the neighborhood with 
                                                                                                                           both dogs in hand.  
                   The worry of being a nuisance, noisome, a nail which sticks out too much.   

                                                                           Almost known by association. To be known 
          through your creatures. You feel more seen and recognized and also not at all.   

           Start to watch for the second meeting to see what emerges from the double 
                      encounter? Can my dog produce the same behavior or will this second 
                                                                             meeting be a reversal of the effort before?

~

I face the task of the long drive without C, the most dangerous highway in America, waiting for a mattress in the face or a slow-moving glacier of a slow burn. Under glass, waiting for first strike or a hundred insidious paper cuts of attrition.

---

Ching-In Chen is descended from ocean dwellers and author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They teach at University of Washington Bothell.