Reflection on a Love Poem

By Chen Chen

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This poem, “Summer Was Forever,” is from my first book, and it remains one of my personal favorites, in large part because I have such fond memories of sharing and receiving feedback on it during a workshop led by the brilliant Marilyn Chin at the Kundiman Writers Retreat back in 2014. What a magical time, that workshop, that whole retreat. My writing process changes in all kinds of unexpected ways while in writing community, and that’s what I always aim to foster as a teacher of poetry, whether it’s a semester-long course or a single generative session—I strive to cultivate a shared space, a space in which we share our learning, our leaping, our surprise.

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“Summer Was Forever”

Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick.
I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought,
What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind
of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor,
married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop,
your life sucks. But sometimes no one said anything & I saw
him, the local paper boy on his route. His beanstalk frame
& fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.
Previously published in When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). Reprinted with author permission.