Two Poems by Zen Ren
Read an interview in which Zen Ren discusses leaving and returning to writing, soap operas, and serving your heart and not your ego.
Tricks for good weather and bad
The dads return to the skatepark with flamethrowers. Ice cracks through the concrete, setting a new season of where the kids try to kickflip. The concrete takes blessings by fire and rain pockmarks it all over again in patience. How quickly spring begs for violence. Everyone grinds the rail the first time without trying and then the next ten times it’s the knowledge that makes them crash. The toddlers at the park are ripping it up, still at the age where they squat better than Olympic weightlifters. Fear forgets nature, is forgetting’s nature. You haven’t yet learned the accident of flying but you’ve read all the scripture and know it’s as simple as pretending to die. Wobbling on the rail, frightened of necessary mistakes, you’re saved when the skatepark veteran snakes in front of you, crouching impossibly low. You pray for the sickest airtime you’ve ever seen: an invention wild enough to scrape at God. But he only scoops a moth from the ground, half-crushed, one wing singed. They only live for a few days anyway, he says. The moth doesn’t hear him, flies right back to the dads’ flamethrowers and you can’t stop it, can’t stop anything. To the moth all fire is sun. To the sun all life is moth. And why shouldn’t we be–our skin bare slips of paper, lives defined by lifetimes–bodies made to burn? You would give everything to know it: that wing, that ash; dust what becomes, falling from the sky as you try and try again.
The way you are good to me
It wasn’t when you admonished
my thin shoes for touring the cavern, freed
by an ancient vein of lava. It wasn’t when
our guide told us about stalactites and stalagmites
and you made the requisite joke about their difference,
your laughter folding upon itself, a silt
of good years. When a stalactite finally
touches its stalagmite, can it partake
in what made it–does it forget the solitude?
We learned life here was forced
to evolve alone: cockroaches, but also
rare luminescent grasshoppers you hoped to see.
(You had a saying for lonely creatures too,
how solitude convinces us all we’re more perfect
as crabs.) It wasn’t even when I was afraid
of cockroaches scuttling around us, this dried artery
threatening with life, and you reminded me
those sounds could still be cute grasshopper feet.
But at the heart of the cave I saw it:
a drop of shadow clotting wet reflection.
You let go of my hand.
You went to take a look.
You turned back, made your face all bored:
just a grasshopper. No need
to look closer.
That was when I knew the way
you’d be good to me. Like that we left
in our civilization of two people.
I let my fear lie
in that hollow,
stone branches
yearning towards each other,
I let it cast over itself
in eras, and eras, and eras.
Zen Ren is a queer first-gen Chinese American writer in Austin, Texas. Their work is published or forthcoming in New England Review, Electric Literature, Swamp Pink, Nimrod, Boulevard and more. They are a ’23 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, won Nimrod’s ’23 New Writer Award for fiction, and have been recognized in Glimmer Train and New Letters contests. Their poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart. Outside of working on their first novel, they work in UX research and also knit, sew, and surfskate. Say hi at zenrenwrites.com or @zenbyhand!
