For this essay, Choose three of the poems we will have read together in class and write a short analysis comparing and contrasting them. These can be poems you’ve imitated but they do not need to be.

Pick a theme of personal interest to focus on. Maybe you’re interested in comparing emotional tone or audience appeal across three different slam poems. Maybe you’re interested in the way poets create images or the way that poem titles affect your readings of the poems themselves.

Choose one element to focus on in your close critical reading of your three poems. Be sure to cite specific examples and/or lines from each poem.

Essay will be graded based on: clarity of connections between the three poems, close reading ability, use of clear and relevant examples from the poems.

Limón, Ada. Bright Dead Things. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015.

 

How to Triumph Like a Girl

 

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winnings. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds

 

My ex got hit by a bus.

 

He wrote me in a text to tell me this.

Now will you talk to me? I got hit by a bus.

 

He even sent me a lint to the blurry footage on the news.

I never wanted to see him come to harm, or watch it.

 

Oh maybe a little cockroach infestation.

Little aliens all over the clean, misleading counters of his life.

 

My ex, a few exes before that, died

of a heroin overdose.

 

After someone hurts you, t’s easy to imagine

him fading into eh background of the bad film’s revenge plot.

 

It’s the joke, right? I hope you get hit by a bus.

I swear I never thought it. No seed of transportation deviance.

No tampering with the great universal brake wires.

 

I wanted this rusty mailbox,

out here in the boondocks, this man, and this dog,

a little money now and again, some good news.

 

I’m the hidden bug in the tall weeds,

lighting fires no one can see.

 

*

 

When we moved out here together, I kept apologizing

for everything, like a poor orphan in the film about my shame.

 

He had to tell me to stop. And for days, (maybe weeks?)

I’d hear it in my mind and have to hold it there,

stuck like a cockroach under a glass,

waiting for someone braver to kill it.

 

Mostly, I enjoy my failings. Until I don’t.

 

In the text from my ex about the bus, he sounds almost funny.

Like isn’t it ironic that I got hit by a bus, when all I ever

wanted was to

disappear without a trace.

 

*

 

When the plane went down in San Francisco,

I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

 

He memorizes the wrecked metal details,

the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

 

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes:

The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

 

How people go on, and how people don’t.

 

It was almost a year before I learned

that his brother was a pilot.

 

I can’t help it,

I love the way men love.

 

*

 

I used to pretend a lot. I’m very good at it.

 

I bought a creamy corn-colored rotary phone

and I was so fabulous.

 

I’d sit and tell you about my phone, but the truth was

it didn’t work very well. It made me not want to talk to anyone,

but rather be in a picture, holding the phone, pretending to talk.

 

That’s not unlike some of the people I have claimed to love.

 

I’d rather tell you about them, stranger, in hot words

than tug the cold satellites closer for warmth.

 

*

 

I imagine the insides of myself sometimes—

part female, part male, part terrible dragon.

 

What I saw in the men who came before,

sometimes I don’t want to say this out loud,

 

was someone I could hold up to my ear

and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into,

and have it returned in the inky waves.

 

*

 

Why are we forced into such small spaces together?

This life in a seedpod.

 

I remember once, my ex and I, driving in his van.

He pointed out his ex-wife walking.

 

She looked like me—not her blue hat, or her smallness,

but how deliberately she was walking away form the speeding vehicle.

 

Now, there’s a twisty summer storm outside,

and I desire nothing but this storm to come.

 

The calm voice on the TV tells us to stay sake.

Says, Stay safe and seek shelter.

Prickly Pear & Fisticuffs

 

My older brother says he doesn’t consider himself Latino anymore

and I understand what he means, but I stare at the weird fruit in

my hand and wonder what it is to lose a spiny layer. He’s explaining

how white and lower-middle class we grew up and how we don’t

know anything about any culture except maybe Northern Califor-

nia culture, which means we get stoned more often and frown on

super stores. I want to do whatever he says. I want to be something

entirely without words. I want to be without tongue or temper. Two

days ago in Tennessee someone said, Stop it, Ada’s Mexican. And I

didn’t know what they were talking about until one of them said, At

least I didn’t say wetback. And everyone laughed. Honestly, another

drink and I could have hit someone. Started the night’s final fight.

And I don’t care what he says. My brother would have gone down

swinging and fought off every redneck whitey in the room.

The Whale & the Waltz Inside of It

 

I don’t even know how to get to Alaska,

or how to talk about race when the original tongue is gone.

 

Imagine a woman at the edge, at the border

of the universe waving without an idea

of where to wave, into emptiness, into a bliss?

 

I moved to New York City once with cash money

I’d saved from being a receptionist for the county and a box

of books I’d never read.

 

No one tells you how old you’ll be one day, or rather,

no one can tell you. Generations are forgotten with their real letters.

 

Right now, he is trying to explain to me

why wales don’t get dizzy, something

about the caves of the inner ear,

 

but all I see is this spinning, icy black water,

enormous rush, mammalian greatness beneath me,

 

and how maybe I could swim to Alaska?

 

I heard about a woman once, maybe she was my mother

who wanted to move to Alaska, but the bears were trouble.

 

They gave her a goat to take to the outhouse.

 

(Not for protection, but for offering.)

 

It had a little gold bell, the goat,

that rang out in the air like a cannon.

 

I still worry. even now, about the goat.

Did it know what its job was? Ringing on like that?

 

I prefer not to make a sound. Will the idea of race go away

if we all stop talking?

 

No, we require the goat.

 

We send people before us, scouts

of air, of water, of fire, of earth,

to tell us how to live.

 

I want to e the largest animal that ever existed.

The one blue mother—

I’d save the goat, and the bear.

 

Did you know giant whales have a spindle cell

making them capable of attachment

and of great suffering?

 

I want to ride around gently and eave

at the colorful human parade, especially at you.

but in the end I want the watery under.

 

Evolution, of course.

 

(Don’t think of the trash the size of Texas.)

 

Did you know that whales returned to the water?

It went like this: water, land, water. Like a waltz.

 

I once had a record of whale sounds.

I swear I understood.

 

It didn’t matter what worlds they were under,

what language,

what depth of water divided,

the song went on and on.

 

What I mean is: none of this is chaos.

Immigration, cross the river, the blood of us.

It goes like this: water, land, water. Like a waltz.

 

I am in no hurry to stop believing we are supposed

to sway like this, that we too are immense and calling out.

 

Chen, Chen. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Rochester, NY: BOA

Editions. Ltd. 2017

 

 

Self-Portrait With & Without

 

With dried cranberries. Without a driver’s license. With my mother’s

mother’s worry. Without, till recently, my father’s glasses. With an A in English,

a C in chemistry. With my mother saying, You have to be three times better

than the white kids, at everything. Without a dog or a cat. With a fish.

With a fish I talked to before bed, telling him my ideas for new kinds

of candy. With a tutor in Mandarin. With the 1986 low-budget live-action

TV version of Journey to the West. With Monkey King’s quest for redemption,

Buddhism through monster-of-the-week battle sequences. With thinking

I’ve grown up now because I regularly check the news in the morning.

With the morning the children, spared or missed by the child with a gun,

go back to school, make the same jokes they made three Mondays ago

but in a different voice. With the younger brother who is taller

than I am. With the youngest brother who wants to go

to art school. With my mother’s multiplying worries. With my brothers,

my brothers. With the cry of bats. With the salt of circumstance.

Without citizenship. With the white boy in ninth grade who called me

ugly. Without my father, for a year, because he had to move away,

to the one job he could find, on the other side of the state. With his money,

transferred to my mother. With William Carlos Williams. With the local

library. With yet another bake sale for Honduras in Massachusetts suburbia.

With the earthquake in my other country. With my mother’s long-distance calls.

With my aunt’s calls from China, when the towers fell.

How far are you from New York? How far are you from New York?

With cities fueled by scars. With the footprint of a star. With the white boy

I liked. With him calling me ugly. With my knees on the floor. With my hands

begging for straighter teeth, lighter skin, blue eyes, green eyes,

any eyes brighter, other than mine.

Nature Poem

 

The birds insist on pecking the wooded dark. The wooded dark

pecks back. It is time to show the universe what you are capable of,

says my horoscope, increasingly insistent this month.

But what I am capable of is staring

 

at the salt accident on the coffee table & thinking,

What sad salt. I admire my horoscope

for its conviction. I envy its consistency. Every day. Every day,

there is a future to be aggressively vaguer about.

 

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme

headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone

& at pace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden,

which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still

 

have email, which is how I receive yet another email mistaking me

for another Chen. I add this to a folder, which also includes

emails sent to my address but addressed to Chang,

 

Chin, Cheung. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier

was convinced I was Chad. Once, in a Starbucks, the cashier

did not quite finish the n on my Chen, & when my tall mocha was ready,

they called our for Cher. I preferred this by far, but began to think

 

the problem was Starbucks. Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop

needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you

to look at me, even as the coffee accident

is happening to my second favorite shirt?

 

In my wooded dark, I try insisting on a supremely talk,

never-lonely someone. But every kind of someone needs

someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you

I have memorized & recited & mistaken

 

for the universe—another you.

For I Will Consider My Boyfriend Jeffrey

 

after Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, Fragment B,

[For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]

 

For I will consider my boyfriend Jeffrey.

For he is a vegetarian abut makes room for half-off Mondays at the conveyor belt

sushi place

For he must vacuum/mop/scrub/rinse/hand sanitize/air freshen the entire

apartment to deal with stress of having received a traffic ticket.

For he dances in his seat while driving us to the supermarket.

For he despises tarantulas, sharks, flying on planes, & flightless birds such as the

cassowary of New Guinea, which he has only seen in videos & thinks looks

like a “goddamn velociraptor.”

For he likes to claim he is the butch one.

For he is Jeffrey Gilbert of Gilbertsville, New York.

For he lets his beard grow.

For when his beard has grown up & down & out, he takes a tenderly long time

to shave.

For this he performs in ten steps.

For first he looks upon his furry countenance to assess & accept the difficult

journey that lies before him.

For secondly he washes with holistic care his whole foxy face.

For thirdly he applies as much shaving cream as I use in a month.

For fourthly he puts on Erik Satie or LCD Soundsystem.

For fifthly he sways a little, to the music, before lifting to his cheek the buzzing

razor.

For sixthly he shaves.

For seventhly he shaves.

For eighthly he shaves.

For ninthly he shaves, then asks me to come help.

For tenthly he holds back a giggle while I tickle the back of his neck with the

buzzing razor.

For having shaved, he declares that he is ready to get back to work.

For his work involves many instruments, including a large, completely

unnecessary keytar, or keyboard guitar, which he plays beautifully.

For he plays & then transfers his playing onto a computer, where he works on it

further.

For he wears big headphones like little moons on his ears & begins to bounce

in his chair for the room is becoming a continent of rhythms & almost-

meanings & just-discovered birds only he can hear.

For though he does not fare well on planes he will fly to those he loves.

For his beard is already growing back.

For he looks happy & doesn’t know I’m looking & that makes his happiness free.

Song of the Anti-Sisyphus

 

I want to start a snowball fight with you, late at night

in the supermarket parking lot. I want you

to do your worst. I want to put the groceries in the car first

 

because it’s going to get nasty. Because I was reading today

in the science section of the paper that passionate love

lasts only a year, maybe two, if you’re lucky.

 

Because I want to be extra, extra lucky. Because the article

apologized specifically to poets—sorry, you hopeless

saps—as though we automatically believe in love more

 

than anyone else (more than kindergarten teachers, long-haired

carpenters) & have been pushing this Non-Truth

on everyone. Because who knows what will happen,

 

but I want to, baby, want to believe it’s always possible

to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years,

four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight

 

in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter

inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat

the unplowed street & the fog that’s been erasing

 

evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover

it’s some giant’s lost silver blanket. I want to

find the giant & return to him his treasure.

 

I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map

drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. I want to shiver

against you, into you. I want the sound

 

of your teeth. I want the sound of the wind. I want to be

like the kids with their plastic sleds, gliding down,

all the way down the hill, then trudging

 

their sleds & snowsuited bodies all the way

back to the top. I want to be how they do this, for hours,

till sunset, till some sensible someone has

 

to come drag them away from the snow, the slope,

the 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!

of joy. I want to eb the Anti-Sisyphus, in love

 

with repetition, in love, in love. Foolish repetition,

wise repetition. I want more hours, I want insomnia, I want

to replace the clock tick with tambourines. I want to growl,

 

moan, whisper, grunt, hum, & howl your name.

I want again & again your little dance, little booty shake

in big snow boots, as I sing you name.