Spring 2009, Volume 6

Poetry by Ching-In Chen

The New World
a sestina

(Reprinted from The Heart's Traffic with the permission of Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.)

I cannot remember
the thunder grandfather
masquerading as my adult.
We did not place our belongings in the refrigerator.
Our home lived in the screen of a television
filling the room more than our original smiles.

There was a day we filled the one suitcase with grainy smiles
we remembered
when disembarking like the families on television,
minus the grandfather
we left begging at the altar of an empty refrigerator.
Our legacy's last remaining adult

is always become the adult who smiles
as he unplugs the lonely pea-green refrigerator
and sweeps the last room of all its dust. Will we remember
again each grandfather?
Each avenue bears a display window, encased television.

There are no signs of the missing on television.
When you become an adult,
my mother explained, we can return to visit grandfather.
She smiled,
but I distrusted and now I do not remember.
My new family fills the refrigerator

now with new treasure. Steel refrigerator
and large-screen color television,
warm and snug in the corners. When I remember,
I will be a grown adult
with shiny smiles
searching for grandfather.

Grandfather,
we have stocked the refrigerator
in honor of your smiles.
This legend of television
encourages each adult
to dis-remember

her own grandfather.
In each land, there is a refrigerator
filled to the brim with smiles.


BIO:  Ching-In Chen is a poet and multi-genre, border-crossing writer. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a Kundiman Asian American Poet Fellow. A community organizer, she has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston. Ching-In's work has recently appeared in Tea Party, Fifth Wednesday Journal, OCHO, Iron Horse Literary Review and Water~Stone Review. Ching-In currently lives in Riverside, California, where she is in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of California Riverside.