Chris Chan

Someone above our heads is building a fence
to keep his neighbors’ weeds out. Pushing the stake
into the ground, he lifts the hammer to strike
the sharp spoke down, and at his feet explodes
a clod of earth. He does this rhythmically — right
fist clenched, left hand loose — as though
the dream of weedless grass were enough
to keep him breathing, to keep him sweating beneath
the springtime sun. The whitewashed wall will leave
no gaps, and the garden he planted will thrive
as it did last season, when no one noticed
the dandelions crouched among the tiger lilies
brought in from elsewhere and now settled
with the rest. Perhaps he thinks the lawn will grow
green again as his rusted shovel sweeps away
another unnamed plant he does not believe
belongs here. Perhaps he wants the simple proof
that this will work out well. Or perhaps it is the truth
of our roots that unsettles him: shallow limbs
interlocking, gnarled arms outstretched, restless as

abandoned kin, dying to flower in full force.

Chris Chan is an educator and amateur poet based in New Jersey. He works as an administrator for the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Ph.D. He has published research articles on poetry, politics, and the history of literary criticism in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Eighteenth-Century Life. You can find his poems and other personal writings on his WordPress blog, The Phoenix Tree Writes.

This poem was first published under the title Spring (IX) on The Phoenix Tree Writes and appeared in Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age — Summer 2025, published by The Chaos Section Poetry Project. We’ll be featuring each poem from the collection individually in the weeks ahead. You can read the full collection or download a free PDF of the chapbook here.