Justin Chin across four issues
Justin Chin (1969–2015) was a Malaysian-born poet, essayist, and performance artist who was educated in Singapore and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and later lived in San Francisco. His poetry joins political critique, queer Asian American experience, bodily vulnerability, mordant humor, and the energies of performance. His books include Bite Hard, Harmless Medicine, and Gutted, which received the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Poetry.
The preserved publication records Chin across Issues 4, 24, 27, and 38. Issue 4 retains the title “O Sweet Cookie,” while the surviving page no longer contains the poem itself. Later issues preserve “Good Grief,” three short poems from Issue 27, and three poems from Issue 38. Together they show Chin moving between grief, illness, family speech, musical discipline, biblical comedy, persona, sex, memory, and survival. Readers can continue through American poetry, experimental poetry, poetic forms, and the wider contemporary poets archive.
Issue 24: “Good Grief”
When did the metre become the metre, or a yard
a yard, or even an inch an inch,
so that I could take a mile, or for that matter
a centimetre or two.
Don’t go to the doctor.
Why ask for an arm, a leg but not a butt
to fall back on? These road urges
will want to sleep in floods.
When rust crushes into iron,
like water chained to honey,
a thousand aches
manipulate this elaborate symphony.
Grief is accurate. Grief is not accurate.
Do you want to know the facts or do you want the details?
Here’s what you will need. Listen carefully.
Something for when you need help seeing the things close
at hand and the things far at hand.
Something to measure whether the mess was worth the sickly
pile, or even that very last mile.
Why name something when you can just point at it.
Use a laser pointer or a twig if your finger refuses
to work with your brain.
Some things should take care of themselves,
they should need you and not need you.
Not only remember, but remember
to help yourself forget
[and here I cannot read my handwriting, it is so scrawled,
so small, but soon expands, broadening
in its whoops and mad codes,
its abbreviated hiccoughing,
its hacking inadequate cursive.]
Issue 27: three poems
Edemame
When she said Edema,
I immediately thought
in my head Edamame.
Little green soy bean
taking swollen root
in an estrogen lattice
swell.
Edema takes its root
from Oedipal, which I’m told,
in the 16th Century, meant,
‘really great at solving difficult
riddles, puzzles and word jumbles’
not ‘creepy motherfucker’.
Flightless Songbirds #1
Her piano teacher, she said, told her to keep playing
even if mistakes were made.
Mine, however, kept
a half-foot wooden dressmaker’s ruler hovering
above the hands on the keys, ready to strike
misfingerings,
miscues, wrong notes,
unmusic. Fingers
being as fingers are,
mistakes were made.
We learned portamento;
just as our violin cousins in adjoining studios
learned vibrato;
under the crushing threat
imposed by needlenose pliers.
The music continued.
Leaving Sodom and Gomorrah
I’ve got
the Triple Sec
& the Cuervo Gold.
When we get
to that lime grove,
can you look
back and see
if anyone’s got
the shaker?
Issue 38: three poems
Persona 71
Dear Dears,
I have been absent from life & dreams & bottoms & things & again.
I apologize for looping back, putting my two cents into situations long gone.
It seems I’ve been listening to conversations from all their echoes.
Is the glass half full or half empty?
Why don’t you let me wash that filthy filthy glass for you?
That lipstick smudge on the rim won’t be easily gotten rid of.
As if it were a place marker to instruct: Lips go here.
Teena Marie said, “I got lips, lips to find you.”
Which is almost like admitting defeat.
Dannii Minogue, on the other hand, said, “Dirty hands, I demand.”
O. Look at all we have lost, all of us. Look at what we lose.
We are trained to connect the dots, draw lines from past to future.
Migratory patterns, trajectories, downward spirals. Lines all.
Would something like a ruler help us draw straighter lines?
No line drawn from or for me is ever straight.
My dear dears (as Bambi’s mother would say).
As what I said before fires & hunters & day.
Persona 85
The lady at the bus stop said, “Wherever there is water, there are rats;
and now I can no longer look at a lake or an ocean or even this bottled
water in my hand without thinking: Rats! Rats! People do that, you know,
they tell you things and then go away, go on with their lives and then
you can’t forget this one thing they’ve told you just to tell you, not
thinking you will hold on to it like this; like love.
And I said, “Stop it, Mother! You’re embarrassing me. What the hell are
you talking about?”
But Mother just screamed, “I am so thirsty! But those rats! Rats! Those
rats are like your love, depriving me of a cool sip of water when I, your
mother, am so dehydrated, so thirsty, so parched!”
Sipping on my Big Gulp Diet Coke, I said, “But mother, I’m dying…”
The Fisting Bottom
Soon, the carnival of me will be no more
than tossing sausages into an open cave.
The dark maw of Proud Monsters devouring
its shining arrogant young. For those who escape
the kill — the wily, the motivated, the schemers,
the pure (certainly purer-than-thou), the chosen ones,
the untouchables — the wreck is never far
from mind, never close at hand, but always sticks
to the back of the throat.
I have turned myself inside-out to turn
my understanding right-side-up or down; I have
wielded my weapon with cunning & grace & skill.
I have lived past the point
of impact; I have seen my disciples and my foes.
I have courted perfect loves and imperfect time; and still
I long to bloom. Rosebud
was never the name of my sled.
Books, performance, and literary context
Chin’s published work ranges across poetry, prose, criticism, memoir, fiction, and performance. The Poetry Foundation records the central poetry collections and the political force of his writing; the Asian American Writers’ Workshop preserves his work within a broader Asian American literary lineage. The archive here adds eight surviving titles or texts to that record: one title from Issue 4 and seven complete poems from Issues 24, 27, and 38.