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Articles by Laurel Chen
A Beautiful House with a Hot Tub and Pool
I used to love words, but not looking them up. Now I love both, the knowing, and the looking up, the absurdity of discovering that "boreal" has been meaning "northern" all this time or that "estrus" is a much better word for the times when I would most likely have said, "in heat." When I was translating, the dictionary was my enemy, the repository of knowledge that I seemed incapable of retaining. The foreign word for "inflatable" simply would not stay in my head,
Pinocchia, you must not stop for a friend
Skip to main content Find and share the perfect poems. There is a valley in the story I can’t leave until I admit I did not attend the burial beneath it. Drop the pencil with no hilt—arrow the page— I’ll become what it leads to. The histories have claimed you but none will speak your name. Whereas grief: all prophecy, no lies. When this is a fantasy, we both live to discover our true names. The desire ends in you or lives on in me, just a worm I can manage.
Greensickness
Skip to main content Find and share the perfect poems. after Gwendolyn Brooks My wild grief didn’t know where to end. Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. All around me, the field was growing. I grew out My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. Even in the greenest depths, I crouched Towards the light. That summer, everything grew So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. Wildest grief grew inside out.
Provisions Archives - Jewish Currents
Provisions #8: “If I could just leave the old things to their trembling” July 20, 2020 Christina Sharpe , Angel Nafis, Ken Chen Meditations in a crisis on poems by Canisia Lubrin, Wisława Szymborska, and Kenyan Freedom Fighters. Read More Provisions #7: “repair a world or build / a new one inside my body” July 3, 2020 Kamran Javadizadeh , Robin Beth Schaer, Laurel Chen Meditations in a crisis on poems by Solmaz Sharif, Pablo Neruda, and Cameron Awkward-Rich.
Provisions #7: “repair a world or build / a new one inside my body”
I WAS 11 YEARS OLD the summer my big sister came home with Tracy Chapman’s first CD. To this day, when I hear the opening notes of “Fast Car,” I feel like I’m overhearing someone else’s music, remembering a memory—not even mine—rather than an event. A decade earlier, when our family left Iran to live in the United States, I was only a toddler, barely aware of anything outside our home, and she was already a six-year-old kid, homesick for one world and navigating first grade in another.
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