Ken Chen, “The Mansions of the Moon”

The crescent fattened, making content the anorexic moon.
Escapes the smog and eats the road, the moon winds up
our time and chews the road back into itself. The moon is
tattooed by black pattern of branch. The moon is shy
and hides like two people behind a silence and a pretense
of no emotion. It understands what it is like
to have one’s heart carved away in phases.
This is the price of being
other than lifeless.
An eyelid goes gibbous with water.
For a frozen moment, the moon
has sunk into a sphere, the perfect solid of memory—
all thoughts equidistant from the soul,
the thought-light focusing on
two humans together, growing alone.

Juvenilia was the winner of last year’s Yale Younger Poets competition, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. It’s the debut collection from Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop; he recently did a batch of readings around the New York City area, and he’ll be doing another on Saturday, May 15, at the New York Botanical Garden, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.

4 May 2010 | poetry |