~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Carissa Chen

St. Petersburg, Florida

While you are young, catch the last train

to your friend’s childhood home. There are types of love

you have never witnessed before: A family

caring for their great ancestor’s books,

a pale-yellow kitchen in Florida carrying

century-old Chaucers and Augustines from ceilings to floors.

So do not worry so much about integers,

they will wait for you, but trains—

trains are miracles meant to be caught,

like God marveling at the first roly poly

that walked out of the sea and curled into itself.

Since one day, your friend’s country

will no longer be accessible to you,

take the flight now, even though it is tomato season,

and your mother will be a bit lonely in spring, and

you are just scared, since it is lonely

to learn love’s many faces when you have only seen its one before.

So take the praise and the brambles, the cloisters and the train stations.

While you are young, you do not have to stay.

You do not have to go. But wherever you are,

whatever you choose, the bells are within you, and

you are now the gardener of your soul.

Carissa Chen is a Rhodes Scholar and poet pursuing a Ph.D. She was recently awarded the 2024 Kenyon Review Annual Poetry Contest runner-up prize. She was selected as a finalist for the Black Warrior Review’s contest, and her work has been featured in the Kenyon Review, BOAAT, the Harvard Advocate, and The Tupelo Quarterly, among others.