I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party, by Chen Chen

Today, a poem by Chen Chen which was featured just last week in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day feature.

I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
by Chen Chen

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time 
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay. 

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend 
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time, 

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him 

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be 
enjoyable. Please RSVP. 

They RSVP. They come. 
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend 

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going? 

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair  

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars 
is watching from the outside.  

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way. 
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting, 

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best 
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend 

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing 
a Little Better Smile. 

Everyone eats soup. 
Then, my mother turns 

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you 
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like 

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling 
on the string that makes my cardboard mother 

more motherly, except she is 
not cardboard, she is 

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting 
for my answer. 

While my father opens up 
a Boston Globe, when the invitation 

clearly stated: No security 
blankets. I’m like the kid 

in Home Alone, except the home 
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone, 

& not the one who needs 
to learn, has to—Remind me 

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says 
to my mother, as though they have always, easily 

talked. As though no one has told him 
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets 

slasher flick meets psychological 
pit he is now co-starring in. 

Remind me, he says 
to our family. 

___________
About the poet: Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is a PhD student at Texas Tech University and lives in Lubbock, Texas. He blogs at: http://chenchenwrites.com and was featured on PBS in 2016. He is "interested in the politics of mourning, humor in poetry, transnational poetics, and Asian American literature."