Afterland

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,