Race to the Tree

I was 13 & it was night & without

even knowing it, I had successfully

evaded the Amherst police

for 4, 5 hours. It was night & without

having committed any crimes,

I was pursued, looked into

by the Amherst police.

Well, perhaps I’d trespassed:

scrambled up a tree past mine

& its bedtime. Stoic & oak,

it once served with dignity

as “safety.” It stood, so close

to my family’s apartment

it was pathetic the police

couldn’t find me, so close

the oak seemed to be

ours. But it wasn’t—every oak

& pine & birch in the complex belonged

to the landlord, whether or not

he’d climbed each one himself.

I had scaled this old “safe” tree

with my running shoes, planning

to run away—if not far away enough,

then for long away enough

that my parents would start to miss me.

I was 13 & it was night & all night I stared

at the moon from my tree, willing myself to think

not of them, but of how it would taste

to kiss, to be kissed, oh

moon, for a long time, for the first time,

to be k-i-s-s-i-n-g in this

or any tree…

I wanted to kiss a boy

on the throat, not the soft, smooth

neck but the protruding, tough

core of a boy’s throat, the part

named after the very first boy

& the stupid fruit his girlfriend

made him eat. His girlfriend’s

ugly, I thought in my tree, I’d be

much better for him. By dawn I was

still 13 & kissless, but had made it

(using my spy & JV track skills)

8 blocks away, without being detected,

to the University, the glass

& concrete country where my parents

put on their best American accents

& smiles, to earn degrees

the equivalents of which they’d already

earned in China. I was 13 & wouldn’t have

said it so succinctly, but I knew something

about the sadness of the facts, oh

moon, hungry moon, unkissed

& silent, I would kiss you.

In that moment though, I decided

to spit & kick

at the grey concrete, recalling Mom & Dad’s

idiot faces, yelling at me. I was 13

& it was morning & the concrete

deserved my punishment & my

climbing it like a tree & my

installing myself as The Landlord

here & everywhere & everyone

should see. It was morning

& my eyes hurt in the growing

light. & then, as the sun poured its useless

gold on all the solid grey, as I was about to

reach the top

of the slanted edge of a wall,

for the first time my speedy

stealthy sneakers failed me—

& I slipped.

Ankle-twisted & whimpering, I limped

back home. My mother rushed out

& greeted me with pale-faced

silence, then a command to get

in the car. As she drove me back

to campus, this time to the student

clinic, she told me that she had called

& called the police, who had told her

it’ll be alright, we’ll find him, though they couldn’t,

hadn’t, maybe didn’t even bother to try.

I watched my mother’s fingers

on the steering wheel.

An hour later, I boarded the bus to school

on crutches. At school I told the boy

I liked, the boy with the best

mile times on the team,

that I was just getting some extra practice

& wasn’t careful & guess now I’ll never be as good

as you this season. He looked at me

for a moment. Looked away.

I didn’t tell him I spent all night in a tree

because my mother slapped me

after I told her I might be gay.

I didn’t tell him that I hit her back,

that my father tried holding us apart

like the universe’s saddest referee.

I didn’t show the boy the bruise

I didn’t show the doctor.

I said, Good luck at the race today,

then closed my eyes, thought of night,

of the moon bobbing through it,

like an Adam’s apple

plucked out, bobbing through a dark

absence of throat, oh

silent & unkissed—that’s how I wanted

you to suffer, too, boy who wouldn’t

look at me. Seeing you run so beautifully

on the track that afternoon, I wanted you

to suffocate, breath-starved from all the miles

you’d run away from me.

“Race to the Tree” is from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017)

Chen Chen

Race to the Tree