‘Summer’
— Joyce Chong
The Texas sky changes color like a vast PowerPoint very proud of itself.
This week, I have a poem for you that feels analogous to a trip, or an expedition. Published in The Lifted Brow, Chen Chen’s ‘Summer’ is an exercise in shifting perception, folding reality as if something two-dimensional, and finding what is on the other side. How to see through the lens of standard procedure, of protocols and policies and form-filling. We find the world condensed down to the the small universe of your own house. We find sur-reality settling in the drywall. A dulled grief, or, the sensation of latent stagnancy, like dust hanging in the air.
You feel like a cockroach except you know how to use the microwave.
Sometimes, every living thing just sounds like: Please.
Chen Chen has this habit of taking quiet moments, the mundane or familiar, and writing it into something else entirely, mostly through a shift change. An altercation of the camera lens, or context, or form. Displacing the stagnant, the unmoving, defined perimeter with connotations of transportation, the home becomes an airplane cabin, a busy street, a misplaced subway. Travelling without really moving anywhere. It’s less the home that changes shape and place, but the self that becomes transported, finds itself elsewhere. Loss itself is a room, with its own walls and windows that we've built up around us.
In the event of a sudden loss of cabin meaning, back-up meanings will drop from the overhead compartment.
The Texas moon shines like a misplaced clue.
Please grab hold of a meaning & pull it to your face.