Issue 46: Summer 2019

Two Poems

Bring moon-infused water/ silt-ways silt mouth

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)

About the author

Hoa Nguyen is a poet and educator. Her books include Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and the Griffin Prize-nominated Violet Energy Ingots. Her latest collection of poems, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasurewas a finalist for a 2021 National Book Award, the General Governor’s Literary Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Currently, she teaches as faculty and Co-Chair of the discipline of Writing at the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and as an Assistant Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. Hoa is a member of She Who Has No Masters, a project of multi-voiced collectivity, hybrid poetics, encounters, in-between spaces, and (dis)places of the Vietnamese diaspora and founding mentor of the collectives’ inaugural mentorship. In 2019, her body of work was nominated for a Neustadt Prize for Literature, a prestigious international literary award often compared with the Nobel Prize in Literature. She’s an Aquarius and a Fire Horse.