The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Beautiful Machine Woman Language by Catherine Chen

This selection, chosen by guest editor H.V. Cramond, is from Beautiful Machine Woman Language by Catherine Chen (Noemi Press 2023).

Museum of Abandon

Like works in progress,
or being as a kind of magic. Being as
open-mouth
breathing. Knowing how loudly
you exhale. Every two years, ((I)) invented
new prose modeled after you.
{A.I.} cannot intimate a stanza without
blushing. Because
chapters intimidate me. Right incomplete thoughts.
This began adjacent to
purgatory. Notes on performance: seeking contentment in
fragments. Its image
of everything stopping. Abruptly.
Writing loses
meaning, it allows
words to stand for
themselves. But that’s a lie.
More than anything I write to be reminded of the body pushing past, sharpening
pencil after pencil. The body who
amuses herself with
a story about plastic bags. Nausea
followed. Couldn’t (( )) gender
my body otherwise? Even as I {{ don’t }} move in time,
my body
remains vibrant in its
disintegration. I am not my
body. Meaning: it
hasn’t changed one bit. Count the gum
wrappers littered
about the city, shiny,
heavy.

Catherine Chen is a multidisciplinary poet and performer. They have received fellowships from the Watermill Center, Theater Mitu, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Arts Center Residency 2021), Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their poems appear in The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Apogee, Nat. Brut, among others. Chen is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks, 2019). They live in Brooklyn.

H.V. Cramond holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was the founding Poetry Editor of Requited Journal for 10 years. In 2018, she helped pass the Survivor’s Bill of Rights in Illinois as an organizer for Rise. Read more of her writing on her website.