Inside me, a family

^{“To walk in the world is to find oneself in a body without papers, not a citizen of anything but breath.”
           —Kazim Ali, Silver Road}

born from small
waters. Each night,
I look for paper
to feed this first litter
from a slow continent.

New trappers buy
their fetters and hooks,
dreaming of new skin
to drape. In the sky, a wound

like river, opening up again
to bird. Neighborhood pushes
against seams, dislikes
a newcomer. This linked
to history and forgetting—
a new gray house like a weed.

A monument rises past the window. We sit and drink twice-steeped tea.

Copyright © 2021 by Ching-In Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 5, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I wrote this poem after learning that there is abnormal growth inside my body, which led me to think of all the luminous and strange things I may be unaware of which might live inside me. The poem opens up to speculate about the larger landscape that I walk across every day, marking both my own growing awareness of mortality and lineage as well as inevitable change in landscape and time.”
—Ching-In Chen