Maggie Rogers - Live at Bonnaroo, 2024
You are the ice cream sandwich connoisseur of your generation.
Blessed are your floral shorteralls, your deeply pink fanny pack with travel-size lint roller just in case.
Level of splendiferous in your outfit: 200.
Types of invisible pain stemming from adolescent disasters in classrooms, locker rooms, & quite often Toyota Camrys: at least 10,000.
You are not a jigglypuff, not yet a wigglytuff.
Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”
Which really means “queer kids who could go online & learn that queer doesn’t have to mean disaster.”
Instead, queer means, splendiferously, you.
& you means someone who knows that common flavors for ice cream sandwiches in Singapore include red bean, yam, & honeydew.
Your powers are great, are growing.
One day you will create an online personality quiz that also freshens the breath.
The next day you will tell your father, You were wrong to say that I had to change.
To make me promise I would. To make me promise.
Source: Poetry (March 2021)Chen Chen is the author of the poetry collections Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022), selected as a 2023 notable book by the American Library Association, and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award and winner of the 2018 Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Bloodaxe Books published UK editions of both books in 2022 and 2019. Chen is also the author of five chapbooks, including Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). His work appears in three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, and 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists.
