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