The Greatest Play in the World

 By Jenny Chu

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Years later they’ll giggle at the redness of it all. Your ankle sprained in November, 41.54% of a flag on TV, the party 99.99% of America isn’t invited to. At home I wake to snowballs of texts on a blue-lit phone & shoot off more texts & read backlogs seeming at the seams. There’s this girl on my for-me page I keep seeing, the one who says she wants to become president someday. Brown hair, brown eyes, a wide mouth to swallow all the hate. She’s got these manifestos, these singsongy slogans aimed at the cynic’s bullseye. Another comment, not a suggestion: don’t you think that this is much more suited as a monologue, not a poem? Before her, the research was set in the stoners: colored writers are brokies, get it? We’re so in on the joke we became it, six decades deep. Our fellows, shipped & brokered by the promise of American gore. Time to re-edit. [x] Reddit. Once again red did it because in this space-time what won’t they do? Nowadays empathy is not strength but a slow leak of shame. Eventually you need to become hard-hearted, cream-solid, able to knock against your lover’s chest & breathe in the newly rugged, international ballpark. Soon you’ll get married in the greenery as the formerly impossible looks the hell on. So often we have asked ourselves what home means. So often we talk about the melting pot but not the way it sizzles its last watermelon tuna. So few times we say No, this can’t become a musical.

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Jenny Chu is a Chinese-American writer from Dallas, Texas and the founder and editor-in-chief of Rosetta Lit. She really loves Swedish Fish.