MAXINE CHEN
DECOMPOSITION
Once, I trekked into the bowels of a fog-besotted
Liman ravine, and kissed a woman whose scent
watered my mouth with brittle howls. What do
I smell of? Cumulonimbus lapping at a tin rim,
the last dregs of it, the gap between full
cover and skim. Wet autumn armpit,
ear-waxed fear, the possible chafing
from sandboarding down white-grained
swept dunes. The not-quite-dark sepias
of heavy-lidded hangovers. Someone on
the phone with a low and angry voice, asking if
their car insurance covers hail damage.
Before the sky came to collect its dues, I left
her on the rocks to evaporate that cumbersome
stench. I whispered in her ear, like rain. You smell
like rain before it arrives.
HIGH PROBABILITY OF PRECIPITATION
A child in Zhanjiang mistook me
for the food deliverer and welcomed me inside
the loft. I washed teacups for days, drew my heels
upward to dry them on jaundiced branches. Thunder
landed and decomposed in their watery rims;
my burgundy eyes wept for that too. The wrinkled
men negotiating the correct pyres of joss paper,
handing me sticks of incense alongside their white linens.
They let me dress the body with my handwashed garments,
brush through wiry strands with my keening comb. Outside
the overcast cemetery, an uncle offered me a banded cigarette,
his nostrils already swimming with thin smoke. I only turned
him down because I smelt another body, hail fragrant through
the serpentine clouds. Because the wailing was enough on my
scream-bright lungs. Because I had nothing to barter
for his kindness but my occupational duties, the unneglectable sky
arching over us in the shade of a mausoleum.
RETIREMENT.
To remind me of the waiting coffins, I occasionally unfold
an expired opera course brochure tucked inside
my withered robe. The Phantom in his half-masked
insouciance, my voice the crashing chandelier. I met
a fellow Banshee hovering behind an aged care facility.
Easy pickings, she reasoned. If this is the career that never
ends, don’t you want it simple? I should. Instead, I inhale,
and like something that gets very close
to living but refuses to commit, I time the durations
between my bellows and screams, counting the tallies
of nimbostratus as obituaries in my pocket notebook.
I watch the people ambling in the ironed streets below,
umbrellas guarded against the incoming precipitation,
the woven veils of strung clouds eclipsing
the filtered sun. When it’s my turn to play the client,
I want the whole world flooded — every last,
persisting body indistinguishable from the erupting sky.
Maxine Chen (he/they) is nebulously inventing a life on Bidjigal land. If he isn't completing a crossword, he's dog-earing Limón’s Bright Dead Things. They can be found elsewhere in Sontag Mag and Thimble Lit.