End It

By Michelle Chen

End It

Because an eagle can kill a deer and fly away with it. Your childhood – candy picking, Labradors, grandmothers splitting open starfruit, you had it. The grass bending against your pale feet like thin fur, ancestral shot in front of red marble, the camera handed over, you take it. Tall Lithuanian trees this far south, you can’t believe it. Wasps waiting for open cans and the sugar when they taste it. Because dogs rise with your perfume and rub the air holding it. The first time a gay boy asked you what happened, he said you’re just straight, told you that like a doe you were suppressing it. White tails on garlic and brides belong more because they can still heat it. The idea like food when you’re not hungry and you pick at it. When you stepped into a group the sticky water jug was too loud as you poured it. Because they said you were stealing their attention, whoring it. Whore: promiscuous, a good lie, when you’d rather lie down reading in a room candle lit. Why notch the flag with something that curves it? A hole that is black can’t claim it. Your right hand full of fog that warps it. The other dripping light into a small drum, come back when you’ve found it. But the warmth, you make it. Because in medieval Europe failure to consummate was grounds to divorce it. Immaculate, why don’t you prude it? A moth wants a lamp without becoming it. Your face painted like an eel’s, will you split in two when you make it? Watching women locked together and they ask you whether you’ve buried it. As if you’ve been hunted by a bird and you’re struggling to reach the ground, to touch it. Saran wrap in a doorway online, a joke to puncture it. Because they look at you like a shadow shrinking above the trees, say it. Say you’re both captured and the capturer so in marches we’ll bless it. You’re hungry and must lower it. Because below your mother wonders how she maimed it. Wonders if she did it when she told you to close the curtains at night so be it. A body full of warmth but inlaid with x’s. A cat rubs its head against your thigh and you flinch at it. One day you’ll like it. Expired milk clotting as you drop it. Kinsey made you a cross, an addition sign tilted as ice expanded against it. Loving a being but also loving without it.  Lightning encased inside a jar and your fingers directing it. Your barren grease what you make of it. If, in lifting, the wings expire first without dropping it. The carcass and the animal that is becoming it. A soaked match split trying to light it. Because if they see nothing when they look at you from a distance you end up minding it. How can you be so far without freezing it? Because the floor peels when confronted with your warmth, curves with it. The space between full of hydrogen, the lightness and purpose of it. The air around a thrashing hoof no less meaningful than it. Breath hot both alone and beside clouds of flesh that grow into it. The fading light, and the mornings when you can break it. 

Note: Alfred Kinsey rated individuals from 0 to 6 according to their sexual orientation from heterosexual to homosexual, known as the Kinsey Scale. He also included a category he called "X" for individuals with no socio-sexual reactions or contacts, or asexuality.

K.A. Jagai, Untitled
Image description: Line drawings of nude bodies cavorting sexually against an oval gradient of orane, yellow, and green.

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double-time

Every second we are reminded
of mangoes. In one,
she sits on static,

sour, plucked too soon
from the stem.

In another
your knife indents 
overripe skin

and cannot peel, 
metal turned

fist and bone.
In the city there are craters,
squeezed limes. 

Bowls within bowls
by old highways and streets.

That summer when
you split a mango
and found Hudson fog inside

or another life where
she births a mango

as patch of warm 
soil and not
mother.

These days the frequencies
of pits and fruit align

when dropped.
It takes months
for compost

to gather in waves 
on the ground

where you massage
the flowers for they may
bear fruit.

Though your mother 
broke a cricket’s antenna 

when it climbed
her shoulder. 
The amount of sugar

in mango analog.
Summer baby

is the first to find 
the radio channels
inside my chest,

flicks 
the wiring

into a river.
Another time 
you sink an awl

into the root 
of my sound

and rise
the handle up
sweet.

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Michelle Chen takes inspiration for her writing from her hometown New York City, though her birthplace is Singapore. Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Evergreen Review, Winds of Asia, Deep Wild, LIBRE, and elsewhere. She attended the Iowa Young Writers' Studio with the support of the National Society of Arts and Letters and Girls in Icy Fjords. She is currently a NYU teacher residency candidate under the Empire State Grant and a Teaching Artist at Community-Word Project, and enjoys less ice and less sugar in her winter melon milk tea. Follow her at https://silkwormreading.blogspot.com and @michmashedpotatoes. 

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K.A. Jagai (BA Bennington College) is a queer and multiracial writer from NYC. Their writing has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, and Publishers Weekly, and they were long-listed for Palette’s 2025 Queer Poetry Prize. They are an MA student at UCC.
https://www.instagram.com/kintsukroi 

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