Togetherness

By Wo Chan

A debut poetry collection in which non-binary poet and drag performer Wo Chan recounts stories from their queer childhood and adolescence.

Togetherness sends out sparks from its electric surface, radiating energy and verve from within its deep and steady emotional core: stories of the poet’s immigrant childhood spent in their family’s Chinese restaurant, culminating in a deportation battle against the State. These narrative threads weave together monologue, soaring lyric descants, and document, taking the positions of apostrophe, biography, and soulful plaint to stage a vibrant and daring performance in which drag is formalism and formalism is drag—at once campy and sincere, queer, tender, and winking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightboat Books
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643621661

Book preview

performing miss america at bushwig 2018, then chilling

breathe…some reddish dolphins (these bare feet busted),

tore through my capezios, unmoisturized, they join

your pilgrim black boot—oh my mammal…

the wide weekend’s long disclosure of drugs drawn

precious, depressed, high-function high anxious: 2018

gifts us fed dossiers on our stupendous thumbs-down needs.

you need therapy. i need money. we ditch our brains

unable to shred the fog of futures where civics, passion,

paycheck, and pleasure meet. two hours ago, we ran late through slashing

rain on Smith, tumbling you, your sister, (family) in the uber xl backseat,

helped me paste a glittering red AMERICA on my toilet paper sash.

we made it. early at bushwig, barely attended, i exploded the bouquet,

rolled nakedly on stage. i didn’t expect to make 14 dollars cash,

crumpled. i took mushrooms. time unclenched. i found you! sipping rosé

backbar, i was so happy. joy was flapping its wings in the dustbath!

you said i didn’t seem different but by then i could no longer bear violence,

however simulated. i wanted only to see soft things: your empath

friend, Our Lady of Paradise, gives guided meditations, undoing some violence

in synchrony, she sings under the megawatts of her holographic leotard:

new songs about her gender dysphoria.

my smile pancakes beyond the edges of my cuisinart

face she’s so greeeaaaat i say stretching like an accordion.

but, how useful are words now? by then i had lost the white pearls

glued on my décolleté—they dropped far like seeds from a seagull’s asshole.

thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe.

i brag my brain is fearless, yet i wear my heart smeared across my face.

waiting for the all-gender bathrooms with you, i just wanted to sit and melt

like kerrygold into your fur coat. you said it was real. i knew that. i felt it.

SUCH AS

My mother was a fever. My father was a restaurant.

Every noon he fed his lungs to an entire city.

Every night he held my belly searching for a suburb.

I was the firefly that flared only once in my father’s kingdom.

I learned to speak English like a quick brick road. I split

rocks in the backlot of my father’s skull.

I picked dandelions from the underarms of him, my father.

I was the smell of ripe lemons in his oxbone nation. I was never

brave. But, he let me eat butter, held me like an egg. I was pure yolk,

and ate everything with my monster eye.

Oh. Did I mention my mother was the fever? That was my father, actually.

Still my father pressed against the doorframe.

My father was always the fever and always the restaurant.

My father whose splintered shoulders knew the words to one anthem only.

i pissed on a red christmas

tree, dead / the day after

a country tried

deporting my family. and me

squat in the dunes, blessed

the granular earth, and made

the sound of crying—teemingly, unfished

in the broad Atlantic mouth.

i have always loved the ocean i love it

for its size it