Oaxaca in my Jesus Year
art by Jacelyn Yap
by Kirsten Chen
When I came here
I said I wouldn’t bring death with me
but it snuck into my suitcase
and now it’s all over my clothes.
Death wears me like a period stain.
Death wears me defiant
and obvious as a long night the next day.
There’s a well beneath my eyes.
There’s a motorbike in my brain.
It’s distant and spinning
and at night I am the emptiness
its highway craves.
But you– you’re a glass cross
in the high grass of my heart
way out past the rumble strip.
If I get angry with you
everything shatters.
If I seek salvation in you
I lose the landscape
and my place in it.
I miss the lizard lounging
in the blacktop sun,
and the sounds of a Sunday
back in town.
How those church bells
cover the whole city,
your whole heart.
And the occasional firework
set off in the street. You can hear it
but you can’t always see it.
You can look in the direction
from which it came
but by then it’s just smoke.
Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is the author of light waves by Terrapin Books, a finalist for the Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize and Tomaž Šalamun Chapbook Prize by Factory Hollow Press. She is the recipient of a 2023 MacDowell fellowship and has benefited from support by the New York Public Library and the Museum of the Moving Image. Chen has been noted as a semi-finalist for the GRIST Pro-Forma prize and Disquiet Literary Prize. Her work has been twice-nominated for pushcart and best-of-the-net awards, and has been published or is forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Bear Review, Ephemera, Verse Daily and the NYTimes. www.kirstenshuyingchen.com
Jacelyn (she/her) is a self-taught visual artist who ditched engineering to make art because of a comic she read. Her artworks and photography have been published by the Commonwealth Foundation's adda, Chestnut Review, The Lumiere Review, and more. She can be found at https://jacelyn.myportfolio.com/ and on Instagram at @jacelyn.makes.stuff
