EMERGENCY TRANSMISSION

I. Nuova
“Scene 1” … someone says … “Take 91” … someone says … “Hurry” … “Please hurry.” In the poem that I want to write everything happens too late. Everything happens too quickly. Everything follows us but ahead us. Image of your lighthouse hands. Image of a sinking country. It starts like this. “Trust me.” We’re trapped in a locked room. It’s Paris. You’re asking the secret cameraman if he knows what his name is. You’re asking him if he wants this detective story to end at all but all you can hear is someone crying. Far away. In the poem that I want to write it starts like this. Montage. Unprinted manifestos. Freeze-frames of fifty underground beaches. Beaches that don’t even know what a sea is. “It wasn’t meant for us.” Image of ice. Image of the shipwrecked ice that erases your footprints, one by one, all at once. Every screen, you think, is made of ice and this is why it hurts. “Hurry” … someone says … “3” … someone says … “2” … “1” … the dying man says …  “Go” … “Go go go go.” This time it’s a close-up shot of everything that’s going to happen to us but it looks so small that you break my arm. You break. My arm. Into the language. Of shock. I turn my head back the other way. There’s no other way. Close-up but the camera gets too close this time. The camera opens like a mouth this time and we don’t close our eyes. We’re in Paris. Of course. We know this. We’re in the transparent city, rubbing sand into the walls. And I’m trying to speak to you. In the poem that I want to write I’m wanting to write poetry again because I’m trying to speak to you and there’s nothing else left for us than this. Just this. Tonight there’s no other kind of survival. There’s no other way to say “goodbye” and “now” in a single moment that sees the sparks behind our faces. It’s our bedtime story. It’s how we invent insomnia in the night of stopwatches, this smell of time. This is the poem that I want write because I know I won’t have the time to write it. This turns poetry into thirst. “An insomnia that glows” … we say … “An insomnia that turns green and pink while you dive into the voice that remembers me, glued to the wrong side of escape.”

II. Vita Nuova
In the poem that I want to write we’re kneeling on a hotel bed made of superdynamite. “Let me learn to catch you” … I say in the first stanza … “Let me learn to follow the part of you that falls when you don’t fall.” I’m thinking of Atlantis in reverse. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin when he drinks his first flashlight. Thank you Walter. In the poem that I want to write everything leaves a trace. Everything gets lost in the beginning but gets found later on, so much later on, years pass, so many years, when it isn’t useful anymore but you need it more than ever. You need it like a second heart. Like a wharf. Like a barricade without a surface to hold to. Like every noun in your father’s love letters and how they set themselves on fire that year. “So they could find an emergency to live in.” Good. In the poem that I want to write everything has to be thrown out of a fire escape before it can speak to us. Before it can find the sun in our fingerless hands. “Every story is a ghost story that ends in our life” … you say …  “Every ghost is a gift” … you try to say … “Every ghost is the standstill that almost saves a stranger’s life.” We’re in Paris. We’re happy. We’re still locked in a hotel room. We’re still kneeling on a bed of dynamite, back to back. Tell me how our necks crash against each other but don’t use any nouns. Tell me how our necks crash against each other faster than the speed of light. Harmlessly. Cordially. It’s about to rain, you think. There are old photographs falling out of the floor. It’s 1871 and 2018 and 4001 at the same time. “Don’t apologize” … “Please.” I don’t know what to say. Your mouth has so many light switches in it that it’s going to explode, I think. And this room is so small that it hurts everyone who isn’t here. I’m here. I’m watching the space between us. You’re watching my borders as they turn into their own crossings. Good. The photographs are still falling out of the floor and they’re so blurry tonight that you try to read them instead. Photographs of Adrien Lejeune. X-ray shots of the Paris Commune. The face of Arthur Rimbaud getting younger and younger, closer and closer to us. Good. You feel my arm turn into the corridor of your escape. The secret policeman tells us that if we move at all then everything explodes. We move. We were moved. “This is a poem about innocence.” In the poem that I want to write it ends like this. Just one line, repeated a thousand times until it starts to sound like the sea. “This is a poem about innocence.” You’re spinning behind me. And in the poem that I want to write a memory overtakes the future just to give it a name. In the poem that I want to write it ends with us realizing that everything that has happened has happened in a now that always finds us right now.

III. La Vita Nuova
In the poem that I want to write everything is being conjugated in the present tense. Every word. Every goodbye. Every electrocardiogram. And every transparent handshake that we kept building up in the language of sand and glass, without a floor to fall on. Every opening arm, all of your hospitals without walls and 5000 ICUs each. In the poem that I want to write the dead guerrillas of Paris are asking us to teach them how to read again. Ok. We’ll do what we can. Stay in touch. In the poem that I want to write poetry is the fuse that’s lit at the middle and it’s also the explosive device that goes off for five thousand years and meanwhile you fall in love with your broken watch, my zero hour, our parents birth certificates taped to the final sides of our sweaty faces. “The final country” … “The hinterlands where we speak of old friends, of wires of sacrifice” … “And of our freezing beaches.” I want the last policeman on earth to look me in my poetry hand for once. I want the last policeman on earth to look at me while I look at you and we turn this into the end of the world into a corner into a door that goes everywhere. While we back up through corridors, looking for eyes and hurricanes to keep. I’m here. I say this. You break a window with your teeth. You feel this. I want history to be the risk that we take.

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Yongyu Chen is an undergraduate student at Cornell University, where he studies Comparative Literature and French. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM and Cornell’s Marginalia Review.