Justin Chin (1969–2015)
SELECTED POEMS
Narrowing
Less than a month after they tore down the freeway overpass, disused
since the earthquake, they’re tearing down the projects across the street
with cranes and wrecking balls, earthmoving equipment; all sorts of
heavy iron machinery boom, making the entire building shake, the
windows rattle and hum, the panes vibrate like tuning forks in all their
termite-cracked minor flats; they've unleashed something into the air,
those old buildings are like sporebags, crack them and next you know,
things are growing out of stuff, and voila! you have sourdough and some
sort of yeasty new beer, but my respiratory passages can’t bear this new
air much more, I’ve tried over-the-counters and two different
prescription inhalers and still, it's all snot and tissues, drips and atissue,
laboriously breathing through the mouth, which will only lead to a sinus
infection; pity, it's so nice out, spring weather in the middle of fall, and
I want to go look for some discarded drawers at the secondhand thrift
store; I like that aesthetic though at times I feel the pangs of wanting and
needing more grown-up furniture, but how can anyone pass up the
drama of a thrift store, a place so rife with heartbreak, where the
remnants of a past era of living – stuff that was once the newest of the
latest, the must-own fad, the pride and joy of a home – find refuge; in
primary school, we were assigned English compositions where we had to
write the ‘autobiography’ of an inanimate object, like a pen or a kite or a
pair of shoes, and I don't remember any of the heroes of those accounts
ever ending up in a thrift store; I can see the one regret of not living a
long time is the amusement of walking into a thrift store at a point in
the future, to see it filled to the rafters (or will they have done away with
rafters by then?) with all the Philippe Starck and Alessi crap, bottle-
openers made to look like toadstools, chairs made to seat gray alien butts,
all that hyper-designed stuff all for under a buck; but the fatigue is
getting the better of me, my options are to fight and not let it get the
upper hand, because once you're left with the lower hand, you’ll be
forever sifting dirt, or 1 can just give in graciously, the breathing situation
is not helping and the days are getting shorter ever so progressively, but
what that really means is daylight shortens, days are always twenty-four
hours, but that's moot, since I don't have quite as many good hours in a
day as I once had; just as the daylight shortens, as day shortens, so life
narrows, which I never in my wildest thought it would; as a young man
starting out in the world, I expected life to expand in rolling curlicues,
like how. gases fill a space or how smoke talks to clouds, but our ‘ways’
set in, comfort levels peak, tastes and preferences solidify, tolerance and
curiosity harden, each decision made or deferred shuts down more doors
than I knew even existed, bit by bit, the six-lane highway leads to a
single rural lane, a cow walking this gauntlet would wonder if it leads to a
branding, a feed trough or the abattoir, sometimes, it might even lead
to a grassy meadow but the cow doesn't know or expect that; the
building stops rumbling and quaking as if in awe of the encroaching
sunset; sometimes, usually during the good hours of my day, I understand
that there are those who take a certain joy in this narrowing.
by Justin Chin
from Gutted (2006)
© 2006 Justin Chin, from the book Gutted. Published by Manic D Press: San Francisco. Posted with permission of the publisher.
