2 Poems by Marianne Chan

​Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens from Sarabande Books (2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati.

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Ars Poetica


Say what you mean already, the man snarls
with a string of floss hanging from his teeth.

You imagine that if you pull at the string, his whole
mouth would click on, incandescent. You stand

in a friend’s bathroom. The night drinks a glass
of Diet Pepsi. You feel refreshed inside of it.

And yet, the man is here yelling: Say it. Spit it out.
The story. What’s the story? But sometimes

there is nothing. No story, no character,
not any reason to be at the party, other than

the fact that you like games of Twister, aperol
spritzes, the rolled-up prosciutto on a sugar

maple board. Sometimes there’s only the smell
of bleach, a clean bathroom that never looks

clean, only the slush of memory tumbling
into the gutter, dark and barely solid. Sometimes

there is only the silhouette of an owl outside,
the sheet music of its hoot, the German houses

on the street that remind you of a version
of Germany you once floated within, but now,

can no longer imagine. You want to say the story,
it’s here somewhere. But at the party, you’re under-

water with no goggles, your reading glasses
floating to the surface. What is there more

to say? It’s all bubbles and tile down here,
but no speech, and you’re ready to come up.

VALLEY OF FIRE, NEVADA
          for  J., A., & C.

          October and the world alternates in vermillion, cantaloupe,
gray and tan. Limestone swirls: cream stirred into orange coffee. We
find ourselves in the petroglyphs. A thousand years ago, people
carved their own image—four figures holding hands—into rock
covered in a patina of iron and manganese. But we are not the
descendants of these original people. These minerals did not leach
from our bodies and evaporate over hundreds of years. We are sullen
transplants in search of red Aztec sandstone, knobby desert knees,
blue agave.
          What does sedimentary mean, really? I think of the four of
us—an accumulation, broken segments cemented to broken
segments. Before you, I was a single person carrying a bike up the
stairs, listening to the radio in a tiled kitchen, but now, we are glued
here in this lumpy land, this amphitheater. We lay our heads on each
other’s rock shoulders. This was all sea at one point. All strung
together by water.