I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party by Chen Chen

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party

 

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time 

(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.  

 

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend 

& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,  

you will ask him things other than can you pass the

whatever. You will ask him  

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be 

enjoyable. Please RSVP.  

 

They RSVP. They come. 

They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend  

 

the first of the conversation starters I slip them

upon arrival: How is work going?   

 

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating

every movement of a proper family, as if a pair   

 

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars 

is watching from the outside.   

 

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way. 

I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,  

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best 

Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend  

 

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing 

a Little Better Smile.  

 

Everyone eats soup. 

Then, my mother turns  

 

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you 

for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like  

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling 

on the string that makes my cardboard mother  

 

more motherly, except she is 

not cardboard, she is  

 

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting 

for my answer.  

 

While my father opens up 

a Boston Globe, when the invitation  

 

clearly stated: No security 

blankets. I’m like the kid  

 

in Home Alone, except the home 

is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,  

 

& not the one who needs 

to learn, has to—Remind me  

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says 

to my mother, as though they have always, easily  

 

talked. As though no one has told him 

many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets  

 

slasher flick meets psychological 

pit he is now co-starring in.  

 

Remind me, he says 

to our family. 

 

from The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay

from The Black Maria

   Body of sight. Body of

   breaths. Body of trying.

Beloved, to

day you eat,

today you bathe, today

you laugh

Today you walk,

today you read,

today you paint, my love,

Today you study stars,

today you write,

today you climb the stairs,

Today you run,

today you see,

today you talk,

You cut the basil

You sweep the floor

& as you chore, touch

the ankles & hairs of your befores

who look up from their work

in the field or at the chisel

to tell you in their ways: You Live!

 

Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov

Talking to Grief

Ah, grief, I should not treat you 

like a homeless dog 

who comes to the back door 

for a crust, for a meatless bone. 

I should trust you.

I should coax you 

into the house and give you 

your own corner, 

a worn mat to lie on, 

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living 

under my porch. 

You long for your real place to be readied 

before winter comes. You need 

your name, 

your collar and tag. You need 

the right to warn off intruders, 

to consider my house your own 

and me your person 

and yourself 

my own dog.

 

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W. B. Yeats

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Visiting Hours by Essex Hemphill

Visiting Hours
 

The government pays me

nine thousand dollars a year
to protect the East Wing

So I haunt it.

Visiting hours are over.

The silent sentry is on duty.

An electric eye patrols the premises.

I’m just here

putting mouth on the place.

Modigliani whispers to Matisse.

Matisse whispers to Picasso.

I kiss the Rose in my pocket

and tip easy through this tomb of thieves.

I’m weighted down with keys,

flashlight, walkie-talkie, a gun.

I’m expected to die, if necessary,

protecting European artwork

that robbed color and movement

from my life.

I’m the ghost in the Capitol.

I did Vietnam.

My head is rigged with land mines,

but I keep cool,

waiting on every other Friday,

kissing the rose,

catching some trim.

I’m not protecting any more Europeans

with my life.

I’ll give this shit in here away

before I die for it.

Fuck a Remb-randt!

And if I ever go off,

you’d better look out, Mona Lisa.

I’ll run through this gallery

with a can of red enamel paint

and spray everything in sight

like a cat in heat.

 

Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay

Bringing the Shovel Down

 

Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars

I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest,

 

I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will, and in the meantime neglect, Love,

the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend,

 

instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth

and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings;

 

and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak,

so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids

 

who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child,

a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes

 

to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them,

and combining in their story the big kids make

 

the boy who shall remain unnamed believe Max to be sick and rabid,

and say his limp and regular smell of piss are just two signs,

 

but the worst of it, they say, is that he’ll likely find you in the night,

and the big kids do not giggle, and the boy does not giggle,

 

but lets the final berries in his hand drop into the overgrowth

at his feet, and if I spoke the dream of the unnamed boy

 

I fear my tongue would turn an arm of fire so I won’t, but

know inside the boy’s head grew a fire beneath the same stars

 

as you and I, Love, your leg between mine, the fine hairs

on your upper thigh nearly glistening in the night, and the boy,

 

the night, the incalculable mysteries as he sleeps with a stuffed animal

tucked beneath his chin and rolls tight against his brother

 

in their shared bed, who rolls away, and you know by now

there is no salve to quell his mind’s roaring machinery

 

and I shouldn’t tell you, but I will,

the unnamed boy

 

on the third night of the dreams which harden his soft face

puts on pants and a sweatshirt and quietly takes the spade from the den

 

and more quietly leaves his house where upstairs his father lies dreamless,

and his mother bends her body into his,

 

and beneath these same stars, Love, which often, when I study them,

seem to recede like so many of the lies of light,

 

the boy walks to the yard where Max lives attached to a steel cable

spanning the lawn, and the boy brings hot dogs which he learned

 

from Tom & Jerry, and nearly urinating in his pants he tosses them

toward the quiet and crippled thing limping across the lawn,

 

the cable whispering above the dew-slick grass, and Max whimpers,

and the boy sees a wolf where stands this ratty

 

and sad and groveling dog and beneath these very stars

the boy brings the shovel down

 

until Max’s hind legs stop twitching and his left ear folds into itself,

and the unnamed boy stares at the rabid wolf whose wild eyes loll white in his head,

 

taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels,

for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool,

 

and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,

again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings

 

singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles

chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,

 

Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs

of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth

 

slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs

to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy

 

eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick

leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries

 

and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams

that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,

 

Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,

in the bowl you made with your own lovely hands. 

 

The Border: A Double Sonnet by Alberto Ríos

The Border: A Double Sonnet

The border is a line that birds cannot see.

The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.

The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.

The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it hard to breathe.

The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.

The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.

The border says stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another language, and keeps going.

The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the skin of so many.

The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a stop sign, always red.

The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished.

The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.

The border used to be an actual place, but now, it is the act of a thousand imaginations.

The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do not rhyme.

The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.

The border smells like cars at noon and wood smoke in the evening.

The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the spine is bent too far.

The border is two men in love with the same woman.

The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.

The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder are made.

The border is “NoNo” The Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.

The border is a locked door that has been promoted.

The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.

The border has become Checkpoint Chale.

The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and broken.

The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path, not a barrier.

The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not exist.

The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger; above, nothing changes.

The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.