Infinity Plus One
after Terry Boyd
This day allotted red
sun. Control
background,
a son borne
the shivers. Remember I replaced
the river a whole
strand of waterway. Overlap Do you trust human error.
Nervous the line.
Operations a texture
below our given circle
a calm row of pattern
when we straightline
the audience. A small
function where we close
the fabric.
I once shaped liquid path
Then golden river
into mammal.
Then blue sore
spreading from center
towards the crowgray rain.
But There Are Limits
after Terry Boyd’s ‘But There Are Limits To Our Human Ability to Even Conceive Greatness’
Do you trust allotted human error
a frayed
day with a nervous
line which makes a road
To fill a red sun Controlling
texture our given circle
do you trust another
for bridge
where we error the fabric A son borne
the shivers
I replace this golden river
in a whole strand of waterways shaped into a mammal
A calm row of pattern a nervous line could
provide in times of calm, in times
below blue
sore spreading center
To Even Conceive Infinity, There Are Limits (process notes)
I work in Huntsville, Texas, for the second largest employer in the city; the largest employer, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I don’t know what it is about the threads (layers of wildness) which remind me of my daily life. Automation/repetitions and their relationship to constraint. What that small space could push me to access and re-visit. What kind of small and broken story the patterns might start to surface
What I mean is that I am and am not thinking about the prisons – a weird overlay, a daily dust I edge around. I meet it in my students – what they talk about, how they grew up, small disturbances – and I do not. I often hear about an execution in the aftermath and then drive back to Houston.
I’m unsure of what is pattern, what is random, what is interruption. I don’t know any backstories.
Sometimes on approach, I don’t understand what I’m looking at. No one’s voice speaks through or to me. I wait and wait for results, for machines, for reactions.
What I mean is that I feed one line into another, use replacement as a way to unearth something beyond recognition, to bend and bend an abstraction towards a tension. A story made of machine.
Often times it is me waiting for a pattern to arise, a creature out of the funk, saying – may you be happy, may you be safe. May your heart continue to hold a logic, may your access never waver.
Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2017; winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry). Chen is also the co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 2011; AK Press 2016) and Here Is a Pen: an Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press, 2009). They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat and Imagining America and are a part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities. Their work has appeared in The Best American Experimental Writing, The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. A community organizer, they have worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, Riverside, Milwaukee and Boston. A poetry editor of the Texas Review, they currently teach creative writing at Sam Houston State University. www.chinginchen.com