Kirsten Shuying Chen is Ephemera's December Poet
(4 Poems & More)
Welcome readers!
We’re happy to introduce Kirsten Shuying Chen, our selection for December’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Kirsten and everyone who submitted! If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:
Introducing, Kirsten Shuying Chen!
Writer Bio
Kirsten Shu-ying Chen is the author of light waves (Terrapin Books, 2022), 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. Her nonfiction has been noted as a semi-finalist for the GRIST Pro-Forma prize and Disquiet Literary Prize; and her screenwriting has been noted as a finalist for the ISA Fast Track Top 50 and WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Award. Her poetry has been twice-nominated for pushcart and best-of-the-net awards, and can be found in Verse Daily, Bear Review, Hanging Loose Press and on www.kirstenshuyingchen.com
Artist Statement
“What will happen to the memory of his
body, if one of us doesn't hurry now
and write it down fast?” – Carl Phillips
I was a freshman at UMD, sitting in the back of Michael Collier’s Intro to Poetry class that I took as a salve to my very boring business curriculum, when I first heard those lines. Before this class, I knew next-to-nothing about poetry. I didn’t even realize people were still writing it. Then, much to my dismay, as Carl Phillips stood at the lectern and recited those lines, I began quietly sobbing.
I came to poetry because I needed it. At the time, I was a young caregiver for my beloved Mom who was in the middle of an 18-year illness that slowly rendered her paralyzed. I watched, helped, and loved her from cane to walker to wheelchair; privately cycling through intense bouts of grief. Poetry was the very first thing in my life that helped me make any meaning of what I was going through and the generally insane experience of being alive. It gave me access to my grief and gifted me with the preserving powers of observation. Poetry also gave me faith--a word I’m choosing to take back these days.
Life is a boundaryless experience of celebration and grief, and poetry provides an access point for honoring this dichotomy. Even when grief rules the day and it seems nothing makes sense, poetry can help you--out of your senses--make something.
Poems
Each issue of Ephemera spanning November will feature one poem from Kirsten Shuying Chen. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year.
Poem 1 of 4
As a museum
The ski accident I remember
The first time I washed your hair
I don’t.
The distance between my pet traumas is not to scale.
My memory
is knotted lines
and shaping
the land it’s left behind.I’m there, one day, on a square of forgotten turf,
when a landmark rises from the east.
It’s not summer, but a small boardwalk,
and you and I after school
covering the whole quarter mile of it
in oversized sweatshirts.We reach the north end in slow triumph
and you put one hand to the fence for closure.
It is the last time we will walk.
But a snow-capped mountain intervenes—
and your clean hair.
I miss true North
All coordinates run off
All measuring errors vary again;
a concept complicated
by the curvature of the earth’s surface,
a moment lapsing over the horizon
over you on a boardwalk in not-summer
and a bent sheen from which my vision slips.I find myself
at the base of one site
surveying the empty plane.
Where did it go?
At any given moment, the whole map,
held between terrestrial poles,
waits for the altitude to shift.
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Poem 2 of 4
Mapping my mother
The ski accident I remember
The first time I washed your hair
I don’t.
The distance between my pet traumas is not to scale.
My memory
is knotted lines
and shaping
the land it’s left behind.I’m there, one day, on a square of forgotten turf,
when a landmark rises from the east.
It’s not summer, but a small boardwalk,
and you and I after school
covering the whole quarter mile of it
in oversized sweatshirts.We reach the north end in slow triumph
and you put one hand to the fence for closure.
It is the last time we will walk.
But a snow-capped mountain intervenes—
and your clean hair.
I miss true North
All coordinates run off
All measuring errors vary again;
a concept complicated
by the curvature of the earth’s surface,
a moment lapsing over the horizon
over you on a boardwalk in not-summer
and a bent sheen from which my vision slips.I find myself
at the base of one site
surveying the empty plane.
Where did it go?
At any given moment, the whole map,
held between terrestrial poles,
waits for the altitude to shift.
Poem 3 of 4
Most Animals
What it must be like
to arrive headfirst
into everything—
rooms conversations
light.
The body an afterthought,trailing behind. As in
the performance of dreams,
at best, an agility of guiltlessness, a suddenbird careens above the labyrinth
where the nest once was.
It’s hard to say why we’re here.Maybe compassion, revoked, was less
about our suffering, and meant more
to decipher the nearest signpost—not the end, which has always been
a failure of imagination, but rather,
the leaving, a much brighter tale—the originals all in wait, lined along the clearing.
The werewolf’s sugary residue.
The moonbeams pouring.
Issue Dec.3
Poem 4 of 4
Angles
Issue Dec.4
When were you at UMD? I went there too for undergrad and MFA with Michael and Stan as faculty! Small world!