These two poems by Andy Chen sit beside each other like mirrors that refuse to flatter.
One is a dissection. The other, a quiet reckoning.
“Self-Portrait as Treatise on Beauty” interrogates the architecture of desire—how beauty is measured, marketed, starved into existence, weaponized, and misunderstood. It moves between cosmetic science and self-loathing, between pheromones and hunger, between symmetry and survival. The poem exposes the rituals we perform to be seen and the violence we commit against ourselves in pursuit of being chosen. It asks what happens when beauty is defined by absence—by what is shaved down, cinched in, lengthened, withheld. It asks who benefits when we mistake fragility for worth. Beneath its clinical tone lives something feral and tender: a speaker who knows that doubt is the engine of the beauty industry—and still longs to be looked at.
“The End” shifts from the body to the future. From image to inheritance. From mirrors to tile floors in doctor’s offices. Here, love is tested not by attractiveness but by the possibility of extinction—personal and collective. The poem dwells in the space between a diagnosis and a decision, between grief and devotion. It examines what remains when the imagined child does not arrive. What is left of masculinity? Of legacy? Of tenderness? The husband’s fantasy of apocalypse—“a meteor to strike / ending everything / but them”—reveals something complicated and raw: the desire to protect love from comparison, from expectation, from lineage.
Together, these poems are meditations on survival. On bodies and bloodlines. On hunger—literal and existential. On the ways we try to prove we are enough.
They are not interested in easy consolation.
They are interested in what remains when illusion burns off.
In the quiet after the doctor leaves the room.
In the glance that says: stay.
In the ground we are willing to kiss.
Andy Chen is a Taiwanese American poet and educator. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the Bogliasco Foundation, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the 2024 winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, and his poems appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. He teaches at John Burroughs School in St. Louis. To read more, visit heyandychen.com.