
Two Poems
VIETNAMESE SUPERNATURALISM NOTES: DIVINE MOTHER
Bring moon-infused water
silt-ways silt mouth
slit open cleanse with smoke
Lady of the Realm
Lady Queen of the Region
is “hearer of the world’s cries” also
The Holy Mother
Black Lady
Dark Lady
soot face
She can be understood in her multi-
lateral function mediates spirits
to free you from your harm not in the act
of being harmed but the after
(to free you from your harm)
Acknowledge sorrow blue shock
of her running away
Sooty faces as the feminized Shiva
Her bivalency attests to
her power to rescue those suffering
and in peril
Her animals:
Snakes
Amphibians
Owl ‘wh. takes night for day’
Bat ‘half bird half mammal’
Rooster who oracles the day
WHY THIS HAUNTED MIDDLE AND DOOR HUNG WITH HAUNTED GIRL BONES
Yellow and pink comforter ending in pom-pom
cherry-sized fringe on Flanders Avenue She’ll die
here by choice ashes in the backyard
not in a circular cement bomb shelter for one
Go into your tree roll on a rabbit fur blanket
refuse to eat for thirty days plus ten days
Unremembered does it matter
misremembering the baby she lost a different baby
(unborn never born the unnamed)
This rain reminds me of rain
I cleaned the pain but smell it on floorboards
of a Ford Fiesta maybe need to burn a paper effigy
powder puff of stuff from her French cosmetics
and perfumes the tortoiseshell hairbrush father
gave her in Saigon “My Butterfly” he wrote in
in a long-ago lost letter This is a clichéd test
stuff the alarm clock in my bag Clouds
and black in the afternoon (untranslatable)