Jenny Chu
Year Four, First Day of September
I, Agnostic
What I like most about you is how simple you make me feel. When we met, I asked if you believed in a power, or anything close to it, and you answered with your black hair. Now I know you believe in long days, fruit-laden summers, hair swept over church façades, leaving Southern churches to smolder. At tonight’s dinner, you draw me to you the way light tangles through a grocery store. I am your freckled moth, and you encompass me. Yet when it goes to grace, you lose your appositives and answer me with your body. Sliced konjac on the table, no chairs, your sopping kneel. The artificial sea salt in your hair as soundtrack to your childhood. In another life, this would suffice as religion, and the water inside of us would still be holy. Your parents are dead now, but this is how you keep yourself alive. This is how history becomes habit, how you become a praying man without an axis. So I wait until you can dip into red wax with me and let the world, in all its boiled glory, unfold its godless secrets within.
Chinese Supermarket
for 2023 me
vermillion fish leap up / and almost out
of their echoing cells / the splashes
are the music / of a hallowed temple
of worship / little chewy rabbits remind
us of the souls we wished / with grace
and felicity upon our ancestors / their bones
buried under stone / revitalized by
the scent of pork sizzling and dumplings
frying / food brings culture together / simmers
it in a pan with fresh bread / dough hardens
into coins clanking in our jade pots / while black hair
and blacker eyes are all we share / our tongues
dance the same language / to order things
different than shields we erected / to hide from
angry foreigners / pounding on our rice walls
fading photographs in culture’s pouch / are preserved
by laughter shining through teeth slashed / with
slitted fish / sacrifices and stories binding us / through
the silky red string and inscriptions upon produce /
weighing the watermelons against our bellies / we
retain the calligraphy of our imagined homes / and bear its fruit.
Jenny Chu is a high school student from Dallas, Texas. Her work has been recognized by YoungArts, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Guernsey Literary Festival, the Texas Cultural Trust, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the Poetry Society of New York, NSPA, and NCTE, among others. She has studied at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship, and the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference. Her work appears in journals such as Pithead Chapel, The Shore, and Gone Lawn, among others.
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