Marilyn Chin, born 1955, is a Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
From BEAUTIFUL BOYFRIEND
Marilyn Chin
For Don (1958–2011)
My skiff is made of spicewood my oars are Cassia bract
Music flows from bow to starboard
Early Mozart cool side of Coltrane and miles and miles of Miles
Cheap Californian Merlot and my young boyfriend
•
If I could master the nine doors of my body
And close my heart to the cries of suffering
Perhaps I could love you like no other
Float my mind toward the other side of hate
•
The shanty towns of Tijuana sing for you
The slums of Little Sudan hold evening prayer
One dead brown boy is a tragedy
Ten thousand is a statistic
So let’s fuck my love until the dogs pass
•
All beautiful boyfriends are transitory
They have no souls they’re shiny brown flesh
Tomorrow they’ll turn into purple festering corpses
Fissured gored by a myriad flies
•
Down the Irrawaddy River you lay yourself to sleep
No sun no moon no coming no going
No causality no personality
No hunger no thirst
•
Malarial deltas typhoidal cays
Tsunamis don’t judge Calamity grieves no one
The poor will be submerged the rich won’t be saved
Purge the innocent sink the depraved
•
What do I smell but the perfume of transience
Crushed calyxes rotting phloems
Let’s write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poems
Masque stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion
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LITTLE GIRL ÉTUDES
Marilyn Chin
They throw stones at the little girls
Over and over they throw stones
They who are their fathers
They who are their brothers
•
They burn the veil of the little girl
The pink one, her favorite
Not too short, not too long
With gilded filigree, they burn it
•
They play double Dutch with the little girl
Jump, jump
They are surprised by her fast feet
Amazed at her swift tongue
•
Birdie birdie in the sky
Dropped some whitewash in my eye
Birdie birdie in the sky
Gee, I’m glad that cows don’t fly
•
They like to chase the little girl
Up the block, through the narrow alley
Through the barbwire, onto the roof
Over the train tracks, down the gulch
•
They point their finger at the little girl
They shout, “brat, maggot, whore
Come back and feed your brother
And wash the floor!”
•
They like to hit the little girl
The big one might hit back
And wait till the wee hours
To whack you with an ax
•
They kidnap little girls, Chibok school girls
Make them sex slaves and kitchen slaves
They like to kidnap Yazidi girls
Sabine girls, daughters of Shiloh
•
They like to sell little girls, up the river
For a few pounds of opium, a thousand American dollars
She’s just a girl
What does it matter
•
They like to adopt little girls, from distant orphanages
“They make lovely daughters; the boys aren’t easy
They climb the walls and are dyslexic
And the Asian girls are, you know, smarter”
•
They like to bury little girls
Mounds in Nanking, in abandoned churchyards
Around the maquiladoras, along a border fence
Marked by wilted flowers and a crooked cross
•
To everything there is a season
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to grieve, a time to dance
A time to throw stones, a time to gather them
A time for little girls in heaven