Kelsey Chen

pine

All the greatest monsters are landscapes—
a heaving, gaping matter, but also
pelted hands that catch you and hold

you in the stillness of ferns and
other soft things, as monsters do.

I like villains because they
have nuance—things fine & immense
and kind must always be a little bit wicked
that is where the sureness is

that you have been touched
against the odds. It’s when the sea
shows you mercy you didn’t ask for
that you feel with certainty that
something ancient has seen you

and when something ancient looks at you
like that, you have no choice but to go on.

I like boys on motorcycles because they
are easier to stop than a mountain and
sometimes they are good interim sport.

Unsolicited regard from the deep
is not as cheap as a boy on a bike,
who is a little wicked—he even
smells like pine—and gets caught
by everything, you don’t have to be special.

So I go on like that, catching
little disasters, hoping that it is true
what they say—that everything
can be found in the drift and anything
can be undone by touching its spine.

tandem mystics

Tandem mystics end the war. The geese are crying *halt, halt.* Other things too demand a pause. In this coming fall, future debris littered itself in the roads, but not in the woods. In the woods nothing can help turning over, even time. Lush landscapes of remains--is it a graveyard? or is it the oasis? or is it my own tongue singing into the vast, trying to taste the Subtle?

There are ten rules to motion. I don't know any of them. But if the war has ended then what I must learn are laws and not rules. Those are written by the clouds so there is no trouble in following.

Two swallows eat each other in the forest. Three fish sink into the dirt. The future falls unevenly across the earth. Mountains and ravines mark the topography of time, not the features of land. A nose in the ocean; a dimple in the ice--sometimes I think they smile at me--other times, *as* me. Other times I watch for future in the leaves or enter the haunt in the black woods. But I do not know much of the uncanny, only that the war is over and the tea is singing and I might once again take up bread and a bit of salt and maybe even a flower or half a jewel.

year of the cherry

The cherry flickers red gold
and swamp-toned sharp.
The floating is stilled midway.

If this spring I am to be crowned
the young emperor
I promise to lose everything,

especially the world.
My sisters and I,
we have been doing this for
a very long time.
We have chosen this before.

There is a snake in the ground.
There is dust in the sea.
There is no new age coming.

It enters us from the past, nested.
Undoing is the motion of dynasty
or so the frogs say in their

uncorked voices, *look
at the unstoppered flow,*
that is called embedding--
I learned it from the ruby sages.

If this summer I am crowned
the young emperor
I will bury the throne inside the earth.

I will swallow it and let it sit
inside my belly.
I will lose it in my belly.

The structure or the movement
through it. Both of these

are gestures.

shoal

You. You are the breath
of many small sunsets.

So you bruise easy—fight hard.
You do everything, hard.

That’s why you can
tumble uphill, why you can

cry at the thinnest shred
of pink shoaling sky and street,

so bitter and so joyous.
With you everything

is taken seriously, you are
exceedingly careful

with everything except yourself.
A butterfly wraps an egg

in its own body—what kind
of logic is that?

Your beauty is in your
uncompromise.

Discipline is elemental—
you carry an unending proof
as dirt under you fingernails.

What does it matter
which body cracks first?

All moments are endangerment
in you seeded by sun.

Symbol is not to be
lived gently.

You hold all important things
under your tongue

as if otherwise
it’d be destroyed in verse—
kind and unwise,

you carry in you an ark
of porcelain things.

prienne

What do I do when even
the cups have waists here.
Everything beckons the touch,
the fingers. What to do
when everything proves ungraspable.

The mist moves through long lashes.
The sun through crocheted hats
turns dirt road into blooming sand
and the grape vines,
the fig trees, the stray dogs

all call, all offer, all seek
the touch, the fingers.
It is always the smooth things
with grooves for gripping
that are most elusive.

The sheep are eating as if
the grasses might run,
The rotting stay tethered to trees
while the young slip onto the
slick stones, the ruined marble.

Fruits from the ruins
are the canaries of disavowed futures,
postponed ghosts, singing
of the haunt and the tight secrets of time.

Lore materialized is just this:
A pomegranate dashed against
young marble to find no innards,

or an ancient graffiti gamble
left eons ago in contemporary mortar.

Seeing all this I have
a sudden urge to nap
which I must now see to.

castle

Edge to edge I tread—
I am not a nomad—
All places are carried
in me as puddles.
A small mirror in a rock
opens dialogue
with the mountains.
That is how a mountain
speaks—through
red pine & tiny puddles
burrowed in stone.
When a mountain speaks it
teaches you to look for
softness in stone and
motion in the sessile.
Uprooted we are brought
into our glory. When
I hum in still air
the mountain sings back.
All that can be said

is in the dirt. When
I put the whole mountain
in my mouth
it rings. When

I swallow it drops me
into all the rest of it.

wildfires

Haze is the taste of our generation; 
with sweet sun spilling over your lips you gaze 
over my shoulder just as the dust in the air 
and the setting sun catch some deep resonance, 
and suddenly the air has thickened, breath hitches, 
and new humidity fucks the skies, there is 
nothing as beautiful as you are. 

There must be metal in the surface engravings 
of our skin, slim mirrors in miasmic light— 
Once upon a time there was glitter, and 
there was light, and now, there is bronze 
counterweighted against an ocean, there is 
nothing like the poetry of this moment, 
a slow, honey shift against the California ash.