by Mai Der Vang
Now what century
fell down at your door?
What cold bowl of oats
did you repurpose into blessings?
From the kettle tongue,
take my answer as a sun-hatched shadow
slipping to meet your palm
inside the vapor of our moment.
Take this entire autumn of waiting.
Be held by the sense
of an answer
the way an animal can sense
where the rain will fall.
Final Dispatch from Laos
Concerning our hollow breasts,
Lice factions multiplying in our hair.
Concerning our unused stomachs,
Molars waiting to chew, taste buds
Obsolete. By then, we won’t remember
We’re alive. We’ll be the soil covered
In mines. Concerning last night’s
Attack, seven dead, five injured, four
Gone missing, three arms. Concerning
A forest in combat, alliance of trees,
Countercoup to the coup, concerning
Dominos. They’ll arrive to collect
Our eyes, but the vines will have eaten
Us up. As for our feet, we left them behind.
And as for our heads, they went foraging
For roots. With regard to shrapnel jutting
From a boy’s leg. An old man lured into
The fire by his dream. A woman cradling
Her intestines. With regard to orphans.
A sweet leaf unable to father any txiv.
A hand without. We are yet done,
The leftovers ever still waking
Inside the smoke of a hole.
Terminus
I feel the gear switch
inside the moon.
Touch folded joss paper
of unburied breath.
I am ready to materialize
into calf, wrist, ear,
profile whittled from sugar flood.
In a thumb’s rotation,
I hear condolences
from the eclipse,
light the hidden storm in my hands.
I leave on the horse,
my coral bridge.
Between globe, birth jacket,
tenant of the flesh,
this is homecoming to a mother
who will make me.
I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs
It’s been forty years of debris
turning stale, and submunitions
still hunt inside the patina of my mud.
I’m stumbling with ankles steeped
in my little wrecked chimneys.
A foot wedged inside a sandal.
The bandage wraps my chest and I
sense the new branches of a cypress
within me, waiting to tear open
the gauze. Where are the high verandas
that once guarded elephants.
What ends the deepening numbers,
resounding into night, a planeload
releases every eight minutes forever.
Left only with cistern walls dismantled
in this era of widows, this is no way
to be lived, clawed and de-veined by
steel splinters concealed. The ground
knows more than a child will ever.
No way to seal the gaps, when a smuggled
climate spills over my body, taints me
with cobwebs spun from overseas.
With Animal
Your mouth opens to glass
that stores late winter,
meadow within a jar.
I know the brick of your body’s roof,
walls unlocking leathered eyes.
You who swallowed the stone
now sleep in your tail’s swagger,
hunt without the jade
inside your marrow.
In these tainted tropics,
you are more, not medicine of teeth
nor bone that cures.
I will wear your newest splinters,
wake your mask of manna,
mark you as my pendent leg.
Until the crossbow you carry
rises from
the morning skin’s batik.
Ambush
On his knees with a swampy
Cloth, he wipes the ceramic
Crocodile on the bottom shelf.
He won’t stand to watch the dust
Crawl too gladly in the light,
Heaping on baseboards,
Up the metal trunk of the desk,
Tired of her pennies elbowed
In crevices, a paper clip
Pushed to the corner as she
Sits in the rolling chair, arms
Folded, smirking like a hyena.
In the mirror, her gaunt eyelids
Slouch, searching for the owner
Of her face. Even a magpie
Can guess its own reflection.
Sometimes the room is a hole,
A chasm digging into their bed.
Below the sofa, a faded receipt
From dinner on Valentine’s,
A dusty Post-it that won’t unfold,
Price tags from sweaters last
Year. How much dust gathers
In the stuffing of animals.
He hates tangling his feet
On her hair camouflaged
In the rug, stitched in chestnut
Fiber talons. He runs his palm
Along the pelt, scraping the tufts
Into his fist, rip and pull,
Until at last exposed: snout
Piercing through spiked rug,
Built jaws ready to pounce.
A Mouth and Its Name
You told me north water
was not built by virga
but from suicide of the moon.
That letters could turn
into ruptured atlas,
spill off the brass orbit of a dirge.
Go on living, but never say
the names of the dead.
No muscle inside the bells.
A weapon body does not give.
I mark you in charcoal:
anonymous.
It was you throwing feet
against the glass frame.
You let me dream of sand rattling
its desert costume,
then polished coins
ripped from a string of iridescent beads.
With it, every shattered hyphen
that erased you
from your animal sign.
To the Longhorn Hmong
In the dove tree
Corrals of your hair,
A scaffold ascends
The perfumed winter
Where frost has hewn
You into azalea.
A cello slinks
From every strand.
Vineyards ribbon
Inside the intimate air.
Tonight, the globe
Is so familiar and close.
It could be the cape,
Or a caravan
Of fossil and wool,
The forebear tresses
Granted to you.
Every section
Is a calm factory,
A festival of sapphires
Watering your skin.
Mother of People without Script
You swear the twin spirits
taught you to write.
At night, you climbed
the leaves to hear the gods.
Catch in the throat. Hollow breath.
Paj is not pam is not pab.
Blossom is not blanket is not help.
Ntug is not ntuj is not ntub.
Edge is not sky is not wet.
On sheet of bamboo
with indigo branch.
To txiav is not the txias.
To scissor is not the cold.
The obsidian mask
will make its own slee
p,
leave behind the silver
your body won’t shed.
Now you are Niam Ntawv
who was once a young farmer
scrawling in secret toward
the triggering day.
When they could take no more,
when all that you had was given,
you lined your grave with paper.
When the Mountains Rose beneath Us, We Became the Valley
I won’t ask why the saola came
To you, father, or of the poacher who
Followed, but I ask of the country
You lost, the one I never had, unlike
The midwife who sketched birth
Maps on a girl’s body and found
A rainforest in her belly. I ask why
A body is born to save money
But can’t pay to cross hell’s ferry,
Or why snow tells us heaven
Is cold. A sunken missile maddens
Radiant as firework to the eyes
Of a tribesman, witnessing for
The first time. How did an ancient
Boy drown in a homeless river. I ask
Why the warsick warrior who hunts
With claws is hiding a poem. A piece
Of paper hides a garden. What
Harrowed you most arriving at the last
Minute to catch your brother’s
Final breath on the hospital bed.
Can a unicorn kindle the night,
Haloed by its flame, torches jutting
From its head. Live on. Ask me how I’ve
Saved us. Ask me to build our temples
So rooted, so stone, we won’t ever die out.
My mouth is nocturnal.
I Shovel into the Heart to Find Its Naked Face
Chambers fall to splinter gravel.
Leaf grows from my throat.
Walls forsake the crumpled ground
It is meant to hold up.
There is much so
A cavity will collect.
I ask to exit from the house:
Spirit of paper temple,
Spirit of cooking fire,
Sentinel at the door, what keeps
Within the loft.
This burns in heaven with
Remembrance of dust:
Spirit of kindling,
Inside the gourd.
My pocket keeps the disfigured
Orange years,
Used wooden
Matches.
I pin myself to the land-living
Slipping surely everborn.
Three
Grave guardian,
slumber with bones from now on.
You are closer to earth
than the reindeer who buries his head
in snow smelling for moss,
nearer than well water,
closer than the fox.
Minerals of the living fold into ivy
and basalt. Ground goes on above.
Drifter of descendants,
let go of your startled skin.
Your pigmented breath
is a frightened thrush
prone to bolting.
Do not flee your keeping.
Each plate will be plentiful
as long as the children remember you.
Changemaker,
you are meant to arrive so as to return.
Like arctic fauna
shedding winter pelt,
weather dwells inside your mane.
Lava contours in your palm.
Your throated cold is built from clay
evershifting
in the hardened eye.
Crash Calling
Do not linger here that is not your brick,
Nor cling to the elbow of a passing car.
The median will trap you during day,
Clip your eyes to hunger as you forage
Along these thin and splintered roads.
Come to the calico kitchen
Where a grandchild grows and waits
For you to string his failed balloon.
He will drop the thread, every time again,
Until you hear the wishing in his chest.
He will bury the morning dove dying
Inside your shoe. Still, there are secrets
You preserve: tarnished coins folded
In a worn blue cloth.
Thrasher
I murder my tongue,
Hang it on a jagged line
Between the galaxy
Of every bitten wall.
My mother no longer
Hangs the laundry. I burn
My tongue in a tarnished
Truck outside my empty
Yard. A fire at two a.m.
Twenty years ago. The night
Straining a child’s wild eyes.
I hide my tongue within
The unleafed wooden scales
Of a tattered eucalyptus.
Grandfather once said
A girl-haunt slept and cried
In its branches. Now she is a
Summit purging into view.
She is the charcoal melody
Gorging the abalone song.
She is the monsoon digesting
The laced agate earth.
I draw back what
The body does not want.
No arms no legs no shape,
She comes blazing out my mouth.
Progeny
Fire is the child
Whose parents are the dead.
Amid rafters and clay carpet, the body
Learns to pulp.
Night comes in dyads:
Ravenlight,
Drumlands.
From now on, I will eat the heartiest
Bamboo, drink from thickest grains
As long as the existing remember me.
Then the great little owl and his half-shut eye,
Fathermother,
Canewater.
Alley sharks invade
The window of my ribs.
Home is container is memorial.
The Howler
The man howls in my head,
his stony wind
uncoiling in every crevice.
He howls like a sick ghost
plagued by the living.
An aged river of snakes
cascade inside his murky eyes.
He howls like old steam
bolting from an iron pipe.
Like steady illness rising at 2:30 a.m.
Puffs like a cloud in the shape
of a crab at midday.
He blares in my ear like a metal train,
its breath rattling underground.
He howls the clattering deceased,
whose keening voices I hear
in whispers that live,
whose cluttered faces I see
in embers of the book.
Offering the Ox
Before lifted from its lace machine,
Decimals of incense,
Shepherd of the finger bells,
Before waking in the after
As the offspring of a waterfall,
It turns potent as turbine,
Brackets to be reborn.
Horn to a brook,
Legs into corridor lawn,
It knows how to find the mislaid dead.
Slight veil turns to azure
Rain intonation on aching bamboo.
Smoke from spirit money
Rises into canticles.
Blood declines into the silver bowl.
It is the animal basin
With more wrinkles than the horizon,
One braved who gave itself to inherit
Sleep from the ill.
Dear Shaman,
I’ll never smell your mud,
never catch trance though
I’ve swayed to reveries
by a quivering pine.
Rooster feathers attached to a satellite,
fly out of
my prayers.
I’ve stalked the dead who shake
your curtained eyes. Thrown wax.
A ghost to harden enemy wind.
Soulsmith, carve your way
in chorus with quartz.
Instruments guide on all sides
of the sky. Thumb bells rattle drum
split horn egg. Ladder unfolding
as a bridge. I’ve watched you ride away
on a timber horse to the afterland.
Monsters sprout from gun holes
in people’s heads.
I cannot look past the prairie to know
what moves inside my nightstand.
But I’ve dreamt of slipping transparent,
chasing smoke to marry
my spirit’s name. I’ll know
the ancestors have stopped to rest
when the swallows rise to sing.
I’ll know the contour of my home
by every muscle it holds.
It’s a photograph graying after
each flash. A man falls gossamer
until his face folds away.
He is already at dark’s door
when you find him,
crossing the equator’s end
without feet or cranium or lung.
Swaying torrent
cannot wash him back.
On the day of my birth, you rode
into my tomb. You knew my death
before I could meet my name.
Oracles dismantled
but reassembled like bone puzzle.
In voyage, kin souls came to you.
A murdered uncle tempted you
with tears—
you almost wanted to stay.
Dressing the Departed
The dead cannot be reborn in metal.
Position appliqué under the head.
Fold open its pictured labyrinth
blooming red,
gold,
splitting,
converge,
feeding into tributaries
of farmland in the after. Glistening
meadows where buffalo go to graze.
To find the forebears, wear your
kindred ciphers:
poppy shell,
stripes,
pinwheel diamond,
snail laced on cuff.
Slip on the shoes hand-built from
threads of richest hemp, truest,
only pair ever needed.
Then don the collar embroidered
with fuchsia
ground stars, for mud health
toward stable seasons.
Put on your tail,