Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Pre-credit Sequence for the Film About the Camp

Ken Chen

You crawled back into your motel in a border town near the demarcation line between the nation-state of the living and the underworld. Sleepless, you peered out the window. You could see the neon lights garlanding the Gates of Horn and Ivory. The lights spelled out "OPEN 24 HOURS A DAY" in blinking red cursive. You laughed. Of course, death is the only border crossing still open to all. You watched the illumination from the street pour onto the wall above your bed: a red lasso that looped on the wall, as if the wall had begun to bleed extravagantly. Below, traffic packed the road in both directions. From the two open gates, dreams sailed into the living world from over the deserts. Some dreams true, some false. You recognized some of these dreams (Race, Nation, Gender) and could not tell from which gate they had emerged. Sleepless, you saw the line of pilgrims queued up to enter the underworld. The line seems longer lately, new refugees to the afterlife.

"Pre-credit Sequence for the Film About the Camp" by Ken Chen

About this Poem

"In 2011, I helped organize a delegation to the border where Arizona met Mexico. We saw American soldiers carrying automatic weapons at Sasabe and Nogales, drove to the Tent City, and saw a judge try 70 migrants handcuffed together in forty minutes. In Arizona, I was inspired by those we encountered: Coalición de Derechos Humanos, Puente and its Barrio Defense Committees, NDLON, The Florence Project, and the Tohono O'odham nation, which has lived on both sides of the border for thousands of years. Hope fails us, the poet Juan Gelman wrote; grief never does, but you must not be 'deluded by grief' for this reason. You must not abandon hope. This poem comes from a book, tentatively called Death Star, about my travels to find my father in the country of the dead, where I find those who colonialism killed, and to migrate him to the land of the living."
—Ken Chen

Ken Chen is the author of Juvenilia (Yale University Press, 2010), which was the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award. He served as the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop from 2008 to 2019, and is currently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.

Poetry by Chen

Juvenilia
(Yale University Press, 2010)

"Father's Memory of a Mexican Mining Camp" by Cindy Williams Gutiérrez

"When the Orders Came" by Fatimah Asghar

"Race/Race" by Martha Collins

December Guest Editor: Paisley Rekdal

Thanks to Paisley Rekdal, author of Nightingale (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Rekdal about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.