by Mai Der Vang
green fringe
along the bright tipped hat.
Buttons and
silver threads
cannot decay, will postpone rebirth.
Stray organs
are not meant for a body’s
swamp contents.
When arriving at Root Mother
who sees you wearing
the house she wove
for you at birth,
she will know you then as her own.
In the Swallow’s Breath It Is You
I slip into lamb’s ear,
Velvet all that I am,
Lung and vein,
Wake open completely
In shell and cotton roots.
These carnelian woods
Clutch me into creature,
My eyelids into armor.
Only there is snow
To tell me why I am here.
I bookend the eventide
With a noctilucent cloud,
A silhouette cradling the era
Of my body’s night.
Now firethorn in the garden
Is audience to the winter day,
Listening to the wings
Of a bird for weather,
And this moss, all over, swells
The chamber of your tomb.
Calling the Lost
Hmong people say one’s spirit can run off,
Go into hiding underground.
Only the physical stays behind.
To heal, a shaman checks on the spirit
By scraping the earth,
Examining the dirt.
If an ant emerges,
He takes it inside,
Careful not to crush the ant with his hold,
Nor flutter its being into shock
With one exhale.
Sometimes we hide in ants, he says.
He will call for what left
to come back,
and for the found
to never leave.
The Spirit Meal
It’s been a hundred years
since their last morsel.
No honey on palate, they hunt
the living in dreams.
Now the dead come to dine
in my kitchen.
Paper plates line the floor,
each offering
rice and boiled meat
from the hen Mother
butchered in the garage.
Spoons have been dispersed.
The ground table is set.
As though sounding a dinner bell
in the hereafter, Father chants:
come eat.
As though they enter in procession
to sit at their chosen plate.
Father pours a shot of rice wine.
Incense fills the air.
I picture an opened cupboard
in the sky where the feeding hand
reaches down to find
their waiting mouths.
They trudge as the famished turtle
whose flaccid head
is ready to break. Grains and poultry
turn molasses on their tongues,
dripping as flame syrup
off the chin
until their filled liquid faces
burn away.
Gathering the Last of the Dark
The land has many jaws.
I know not to taste
the vinegar clouds, or walk
barefoot across landmarks
of caterpillars. If I am to
arrive, it will be through
sifting water, through
map of grass and cove.
At the fork that turns
to three, always take
the middle. Storage in my
mind is not my own but those
who save before me.
By now, my fingers ache
too much. I cannot help
the garlic peeler who implores
me to stay and offer my hands
for the shedding. Soon I will
climb the rungs, write my new
provisions. I won’t sing just
yet. Crossing virus hillside,
my feet cling heavy
to its shoes. In tall grasses:
fugitive rat, a mask
of leaves, ant possessions.
Lake opens door to another
country. Ear is basement.
I have gone this long
only to discover there are
veins living outside the body.
Your Mountain Lies Down with You
Mourn the poppies, the mangosteen and dragonfruit.
But you come as a refugee, an exile, a body seeking mountains
meaning the same in translation.
Here they are.
Place your palms on the grasslands. Feel the foothills rise
with gray pine and blue oak.
Here, rest not by the lotus of your old country but with
carpenterias and fiddlenecks of spring.
These woodlands may be unfamiliar, their sequoias thicker
than bamboo, and the rains unable to assemble monsoons.
Still, look out to the distance from where you lie.
You will see Mount Whitney is as beautiful as Phou Bia.
The moon is sharp enough to cut your ear as the one from your village.
And notice how these budding magnolias gesture
like the petals on a dok champa.
Is that the jungle flower you plucked when you fled, the one you cradled
all the way to the ghettos of St. Paul where you first settled?
You cried every time you saw its picture.
Grandfather, you are not buried in the green mountains of Laos
but here in the Tollhouse hills, earth and heaven to oak gods.
Your highlands have come home,
and now you finally sleep.
My vellum remains.
Afterland
I.
In this settlement of ancestry,
I am myself from the appliqué
of my footprint.
I look toward the wisdom
of sloped hills. There, grandfather
stands under ceiling of thatch.
I dig for my finest blouse, placenta
of my home. It sleeps beneath
the bedpost,
calling as the heartbeat underground.
Great aunt spirit swaddles me with voice of tourmaline.
They come in faces clothed with needlework
of pumpkin seeds.
Ox is landlord to the field.
Mare, my docent story.
II.
More as the lit ear
Fiery
Tying the animal’s call to another
Voice as chain
As zephyr
As sandalwood
As psychopomp
As snakefur
As false ribs
As vapored
As hung valley
As yellowing
As parent pebble
As airgonaut
As winter cup
As fetlock
Begging all the skins that are lived
And everything that ever was so deeply tenuous
Beg the inside land
III.
In violet night, I wear
heavy mortal eyes,
searching inside corridors
of the rotten lemon grove.
Ferryboat flies
above chestnut plains.
I follow its flag for days.
Land is a vessel
for little hamlets leaning
on hills. Its denizens remember
to swallow their fleeting tunes.
When the market fell into flames,
they learned to play
in the oceanic room
of their empty stomachs.
IV.
To meet the end is to go back
through every dwelling,<
br />
return my footfalls
to yesterday’s land.
Fresno, California.
Merced, California.
Lansing, Michigan.
St. Paul, Minnesota.
Ban Vinai refugee camp, Thailand.
Long Cheng, Laos.
Sayaboury, Laos.
I go to funerals to meet the ancients.
I go to funerals
to keep.
V.
Drift now as the creature
Not meant to land,
Wings in reverse against wind.
How to index my geography,
Map two miles from inhale to breath.
To recycle the chronology of a clock,
Borrow the ladder
From a shaman’s dream:
Once, I lived in the valley.
Then I moved to the tent of ghosts.
Next came partitions of ice.
Metallic roads.
Once, I was born in a bowl.
Notes
In “Light from a Burning Citadel” the Hmong text translates as follows:
“Peb yog” means “We are”
“Peb yog hmoob” means “We are Hmong”
“Peb yeej ib txwm yog hmoob” means “We have always been Hmong”
“Grand Mal” is for Lia Lee.
“I Am the Whole Defense” was inspired by an anecdote from A Historical, Geographical, and Philosophical View of the Chinese Empire, 1795 by W. Winterbotham, in reference to a Hmong woman who defended a fort by herself after Chinese enemy troops killed all the soldiers, including her husband: “They were conducted into the fort where she had remained alone, and of which she had been the whole defense; sometimes firing her musket, at others tearing off fragments from the rock, which she rolled down on the soldiers who in vain attempted to climb it.”
“Diadem on Lined Paper” is a poem based on the art piece Reina/Madonna by Mexican folk artist Martin Ramirez.
In “Final Dispatch from Laos” the Hmong word “txiv” means both “father” and “fruit” in the Hmong language.
The translation for the Hmong words in “Mother of People without Script” are provided in the poem directly underneath. The phrase “Niam Ntawv” literally means “Mother of Paper” and can also mean “Mother of Writing.”
Acknowledgments
Unending gratitude to the editors of the following publications in which versions of these poems first appeared:
The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day: “I Am the Whole Defense”
American Poets: “Water Grave” and “Yellow Rain”
Asian American Literary Review: “Lima Site 20,” “Dear Exile,” “Final Dispatch from Laos,” and “Sojourn with Snow” in their special issue commemorating the forty-year anniversary of the Vietnam War
Asian American Literary Review: “Another Heaven,” “Thrasher,” and “Progeny”
The Boiler: “Diadem on Lined Paper”
California Dreaming: Production and Aesthetics in Asian American Art. An Anthology (forthcoming from the University of Hawaii Press): “Original Bones,” “Beyond the Backyard,” and “Late Harvest”
The Cincinnati Review: “Cipher Song” and “Toward Home”
The Collagist: “When the Mountains Rose beneath Us, We Became the Valley”
Fairy Tale Review: “The Hour after Stars” and “A Mouth and Its Name”
The Journal: “Matriarch”
The Missouri Review Online: “Light from a Burning Citadel”
The New Republic: “Gray Vestige”
Ninth Letter: “Dear Soldier of the Secret War,” and “The Spirit Meal”
Poetry: “After All Have Gone,” “Last Body,” and “Mother of People without Script”
Radar Poetry: “Meditation of the Lioness,” “Three,” “At Birth I Was Given a Book,” “In the Swallow’s Breath It Is You,” “Phantom Talker,” and “Terminus”
Red Branch Journal: “You’ve Come Back” (current title of poem is “Days of ’87”)
Southern Humanities Review: “Offering the Ox”
Stone Highway Review: “Your Mountain Lies Down with You”
The Virginia Quarterly Review: “Heart Swathing in Late Summer,” “Ear to the Night,” “I Shovel into the Heart to Find Its Naked Face,” and “Calling the Lost”
Water~Stone Review: “I the Body of Laos and All My UXOs”
Weave Magazine: “Carry the Beacon”
The task of laboring with words starts with the self but ends in community with others. I am grateful to a number of people who have encouraged me along the way.
First and foremost, an offering of recognition to Carolyn Forché for hearing my voice.
To faculty and friends in the MFA program at Columbia University: Lucie Brock-Broido, Dorothea “Dotty” Lasky, Timothy Donnelly, Mónica de la Torre, Eduardo Corral, Mark Wunderlich, Alice Quinn, Katy Lederer, and all of my workshop colleagues.
To Joseph Legaspi and Burlee Vang who were both generous enough to give my manuscript an initial read.
To Yusef Komunyakaa, an abundance of gratitude.
To the brilliant Jeff Shorts and the incredible team at Graywolf for bringing this book to life.
A million thank yous to the organizations that have supported me on my way: the Academy of American Poets, Hedgebrook, Kundiman, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, Central California Asian Pacific Women, and last but not least, to all of the young people who touched my life and empowered me during my time at The kNOw Youth Media.
Much love to the community of writers and poets lifting up Fresno and California’s Central Valley, including Juan Felipe Herrera, David Mas Masumoto, Lee Herrick, and others. Thank you also to Ellen Bush, MaiKa Yang, and all of the friends, colleagues, and mentors, too many to name, who have supported me through the years.
To my parents, who never once questioned nor doubted my need to write. Thank you for trusting me to do this work. And to my siblings, nieces, and nephews, who remind me to live. I give gratitude to the Cody Family as well.
Finally, to Anthony, my first reader, whose unceasing patience and love saw me through this journey to the afterland and back—this book is yours as much as it is mine.
Born and raised in Fresno, California, Mai Der Vang is the 2016 Walt Whitman Award winner of the Academy of American Poets for Afterland. Her poetry has appeared in American Poets, the Cincinnati Review, the Journal, the New Republic, Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post, among other publications. As an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle, she is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Vang has received residencies from Hedgebrook and is a Kundiman fellow. She earned a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.
The text of Afterland is set in Arno Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.