Chen Chen

I love what queerness can do to lineage—the interruptions, the complications. The severances, sometimes. The detours, often. The queering. Literary lineage is a pretty queer thing already, I believe—to insist on connections with dead people you’ve never known, with strangers you might never meet, except on the page. Word-based kinship is an absurd leap and yet it is one of the primary kinships that sustains me. To say, for example, C.P. Cavafy is my family seems doubly queer: he wrote constantly, wrenchingly of gay male desire, and I have only met him through his words—translated words, at that. So perhaps this relation is further queered.

What is it about distance (distant relations, distant relationality) and a deep longing for/into a future that feels queer to me? I think of the ending of Cavafy’s poem “Hidden Things” (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard): “Later, in a more perfect society, / someone else made just like me / is certain to appear and act freely.” How this ending devastates me every time, not just because I imagine Cavafy, a century ago, struggling, but also because I see myself and others “made just like me,” continuing to struggle. The hiding and the attempts to “act freely.” The projecting onto straight figures and characters because we still don’t find ourselves there. Here. The projecting into a future where more can appear, more actions can be free. I think of how resourceful queer people have to be, creating our own linkages across time, across and underneath canons, traditions.

At the same, queer time, I think of what I inherit from those writing alongside me, now—especially those who identify as queer and Asian American. To mention just one: I learn and learn from Joseph O. Legaspi, whose new book Threshold is so bodily and sensual that I actually experienced moments of “Oh, should I be reading this?” while reading it. And I thought I was past the point of feeling like something was too physically honest and close. Nope. Legaspi’s work asks you to lean in, then hands you a moose scrotum to examine. In “Am I Not?” a boy follows other boys “up a tree / for fruit-picking” and slows his pace in order to “marvel at the twin jellyfish / of their underwearless shorts bobbing heavenward.” I am reminded of the wet, marvelous fact: I have a body. I am a body. The gratitude I feel for Legaspi’s poetry is a feeling of lineage, and I cherish being able to say—in person—to this fellow queer Asian American poet, Thank you.

Of course, “Asian American” is or can also be a set of lineages and kinships that doesn’t follow the familial in the usual, biological sense. Perhaps what I am most drawn to is the act, the creative act of finding new family. I hope to keep finding, and asking, Hey, how much do you really know about moose?

The School of Logic

The School of Joy / Letter to Michelle Lin