Upon my first read of this poem, I couldn’t help but laugh.
This poem seems so deeply unserious. My first inspection noted the length of the poem, words that didn’t seem like they’d be too difficult, and not much punctuation. The addition of the words in parentheses read like an echo, or a little voice peering up from behind the speaker’s shoulders. But even though I could not process the meaning on my first try, the rhythm and flow somehow made it incredibly humorous.
I was almost going to close the tab and choose another poem, until I realized that I had no idea what I had just read.
The facade of simplicity was so deceiving. During my second read, I realized that the poem read like a spoken sentence, but none of the words seemed to make any sense. It didn’t really seem like there was a rhyme scheme, but there was an undeniable flow to it. I didn’t notice that the first line was a continuation of the title, and instead reread “not back, let’s not come back” about half a dozen times. I couldn’t figure out what “queer zest” was, because I had assumed that they were talking about LGBTQ culture, but that didn’t make any sense with “let’s go by the speed of.” There were so many words that seemed made up, like “moonologist” and using “moonlighting” as a verb.
Throughout the poem, I repeatedly battled with the tone. I couldn’t tell if the poet was being sarcastic and mocking love, or if he was genuinely so blinded by his love that he would have “[gotten] ourselves a little / moon cottage (so pretty).” At first, I thought maybe he was joking around or getting super into mocking other people, but then, I realized that it also reminded me of when someone gets really excited or invested into an idea. Still, there were a lot of elementary words used, like “veggies” in place of “vegetables,” and the reminder of “don’t forget” as if the poet was talking to a child.
The next issue I battled was the general appearance of the moon. I didn’t think it had been mentioned that much, until I started analyzing the poem line by line and counted a grand total of 12 times, including the title. Ultimately, I realized my answer actually laid in the title: i love you to the moon &. This was a play on the common saying, “I love you to the moon and back,” only this poet didn’t include “back” and created a sense of intimacy by using improper capitalization and the ampersand symbol rather than writing out the word. After noticing this, I noticed that the poet did in fact talk about “back” — only, he said “not back” in the first sentence. In an attempt to make sense of this, I tried to tie the ending back to the beginning. Although there were words repeated or reused, like “queerer” and “lighter,” the end seemed to fall into the whole “love you to the moon and back” trope.
I ended up landing on the idea that this poem was, in fact, a love poem. Reading the poem line by line allowed me to examine the purposeful word choice, or rather, lack thereof. I think that the simplicity of it all truly emphasizes the one thing Chen comes back to: the moon and how it represents love. The imagery that he crafts with scenes of planting gardens on the moon and traveling to somewhere far away with an unknown person lacks description. But somehow, it still manages to paint a vivid picture of what he thinks is important. When reading this, even the first time, I always had some sort of image in my head, whether that was of the moon, a garden (I thought of a Minecraft one, to be honest), or of two people hand-in-hand. I think there’s some sort of power in how Chen was able to do that in a poem that reads in a fairly chaotic way.
The final step to my reading process was to examine the context in which this poem was written. Chen Chen actually wrote this poem fairly recently, in 2021, so there shouldn’t have been any historical context that was too unfamiliar to me. Discovering that Chen’s poetry collection was titled When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities gave me insight into the way he writes; it reinforced my idea of his writing being rather informal and flowy. Even though I can’t say with certainty that his poem is about one thing or the other, taking the time to take it apart has exposed me to a different type of poetry that I haven’t quite experienced before — and one that I can almost find myself writing.