EMMA CHAN
self-portrait as mirror
Emma, whatever it was you were
hoping for, it hasn’t happened yet,
which is just to say I cannot stop thinking
about you—the happening
of you and the unhappening—all
at once. This is the thing about static: it’s motion
in stasis, an ocean pouring into a silence but never quite filling it.
Emma, what I want to know is when
your name started to feel less like a sound and more
like a receptacle for noise. A bowl for broken things:
flickering, night-hewn streetlights. The tip
of a crane’s wing, swept into the shadow-slick vortex
of its body. The husk of dawn against the city skyline. Things that knew
what they were. Emma, how many times have you wrung the syllables of
your name into a knot-gnarled
tightrope, spun the outstretched palms
of the two ms into a wish for an unruined body?
Emma, I have been using you too much
in this poem. Because it is always you
on this page, in my morning coffee cup,
in the space between I used to be
this way and I like to think these are still
our hands but from the way they tighten
into half-broken prayer at the memory
of touch I am not so sure anymore.
Emma, here we are splitting
our names against the wheels
of this airplane, which is to say
we are tucking them under
our tongues like how a plane
folds the possibility of land into
the shadows of its stomach, which is
to say we are getting good at pretending
to let the air hold us just as it slips
between the feathers of the morning-laden cranes, their bodies
extinguishing into the violence of flight
Emma Chan loves poetry, pictures of cats, and pastries, though not necessarily in that order. Her work is published or forthcoming from Diode, Half Mystic, and the depths of her Google Drive.