How come I'm a student? How come I became a student? Can I exist without being a student? Can we forego the intellectual reproduction of what a “student” occupies in our lives and histories? I don’t know. I’m looking for ways out through these poems. But the questions will not let me go.
❧
Excerpts from The Academics
when I was six I realized
I was a rabbit of torture
weak & lovable totals
all lovable except for the bits &
bitter cuteness me I exert
torture to rabbits
*
I decided I was allergic to
any awards or prizes or grant
not out of political conviction cause that
would be excusable but out of
my sheer inability to get one
so I can despise instead I got
these compliments again for my
apparent talent in doing what we were
intuitively looking for when we
opened a book I opened a book like
how I opened a rabbit but it was
not me that put my hands
into its stomach my grandma
this combative woman who married
my grandpa for eggs and chicken
drowned the rabbit with such
resolve she recently told me
to go back to China immediately cause
“a war is coming” she had an unknown
symptom to me she kept nodding her
head rapidly when resting
still I was offered to be treated with
restaurant meals by my childhood
friends because I was still “a student”
I said the war was happening
elsewhere; I was paid
to be a student but that doesn’t
matter they said handing their phone
to buy the meal “you are
still in school, right?”
*
I’d like to think women in my blood are not bad, either
I’d like to think professorship is bestowing me
this ambiguity that I am not a bad person but
a bad student to some bad histories palpable
I’m in a book as my dad’s in his we together killed
that rabbit - with talent and money I write a book
with talent and money I eat that book
as a whole you know with many stones, with many
stores I eat that book rich
rich and float, float a kid like me I anchored
anchored provisionally
Yuyi Chen is from Sichuan, China. Their first poetry book, Erotic Continent, is out from Discount Guillotine. The Academics is an ongoing project, and part of it is forthcoming from Blue Bag Press.