This Way to the Sugar
© 2014 Hieu Minh Nguyen
No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the
author, except for critical articles or reviews.
Hieu Minh Nguyen
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1938912443
Cover art by Ashley Siebels
Cover photo by Ashley Siebels
Proofread by Philip McCaffrey, Dylan Garity, and Neil Hilborn
Edited by Derrick Brown, Sam Sax, Michael Mlekoday, and Danez Smith
Author photo by Michelle Tacheny
Interior layout by Ashley Siebels
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Printed in Tennessee, USA
Write Bloody Publishing
Austin, TX
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To contact the author, send an email to [email protected]
MADE IN THE USA
THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR
THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR
BOY
I
A/S/L
MCDONOUGH HOMES
WHEN THE NEIGHBOR BOYS GATHERED
BUFFET ETIQUETTE
TATER TOT HOTDISH
HIEU | HUEY
IT WAS THE WINTER WE LEARNED HOW TO PROPERLY SMOKE A CIGARETTE, OR IT WAS THE SPRING WE FINALLY FOUND BROOKE PARKER’S DOG, MANGO, AFTER ALL THE SNOW HAD MELTED
FLIGHT
GIRLS
THE HAND THAT FED
ARRANGEMENT
MY FIRST
TEACHER’S PET
HALLOWEEN, 14
II
THE OCEAN, MAYBE
TEACHER’S PET
IT WAS THE MORNING HE DISCOVERED CHICKEN BONES UNDER MY PILLOW, OR IT WAS THE NIGHT I DRANK, AND DRANK, AND DRANK UNTIL I FINALLY FOUND MY KEYS AT THE BOTTOM OF LAKE HARRIET
CHOKE
TEACHER’S PET
DRY
NOURISH
THE DOCK
DEAR FRIEND
THE GAY 90S, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, 18+
AT THE SUPERMARKET
CHRISTMAS EVE, 17
DIFFUSE
LADYBOY THEATRE
TEACHER’S PET
III
EASTER, 8
TEACHERS PET
I WANT NOTHING
STUBBORN INHERITANCE
THE STORY
IN THE END
FINALLY, THE SON TALKS ABOUT WOMEN
VISITING HOURS
NOSTOPHOBIA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For Stacy, Samantha, and Alexandria
BOY
My mother’s favorite story, a dull one, of course—
is that she did not scream during my birth,
instead dug her nails into her sister’s wrist, severing
a vein, and killing her—I’m only joking.
She lived. I did say this was her favorite story after all.
:::
They say if the mother is silent
during birth, then the child will grow
up without the ability to smell or decipher
maps, but will indeed grow up.
They say if the baby is born silent,
then it’s probably a faggot, or dead,
or will be eventually.
:::
He was a stupid child. Ate dirt they said. Ate glass
and people’s wallets. Kept a farm of cigarette butts
in his cheeks. Smelled like a highway,
but sounded like a boy.
Stood on the overpass and swore
he could hear her screaming.
I
“I’m not lost for I know where I am.
But however, where I am may be lost.”
— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
A/S/L
Tonight, I am unhooking my jaw.
I am telling him everything
he wants to hear. My breath fogging
up the computer screen like a wet ghost.
I am cracking open my lips with a cherry.
how old r u? I tell him I am 19—I am lying.
I am 14. I tell him my name is Steven—
that’s a nice name. I haven’t done this
before. He tells me he is 43. do u mind?
No. I tell him I am all alone. Painting
myself in leather and candle wax. Does that turn
you on? He thinks I smell like sweat
and mint. I am five inches taller, a hundred
pounds lighter. I have green eyes and copper hair.
I’ve been so naughty. I live next to an orchard
of white lies. I am plucking fuller lips off the vine,
covering my face, my thighs, fat in dirt. I am growing
a bigger dick. I am sending him pictures of strangers.
I don’t tell him I am soft. I don’t tell him about my history
homework. I tell him, I am typing with my tongue
I am so hard. Hanging my clothes out to dry
on a strand of drool. Only responding with Yes
and Yes and Yes. There’s no unwilling mouth.
I am spoon-feeding him
my right arm. I am only here to please, to moisturize
his palms, to spit-shine the screen. u r perfect. I am
picturing him faceless, in some dry town,
in a room thick with lights, masturbating
in front of a mirror, to nothing.
MCDONOUGH HOMES
The only thing that separated my house
from the mother of six who drowned
each one of her kids in the bathtub
was the neighborhood playground.
The entire street sat on their stoops
and watched the six body bags leak
from underneath that door.
When the woman at the end
of my block tossed her newborn twins
off the Wabasha Street Bridge
on the 4th of July like confetti
from a cannon, all of the children
started locking their bedroom doors.
Scared of toxic food and a sickness
that we all assumed contagious.
Every time my mother drew a bath,
I assumed it was for me.
WHEN THE NEIGHBOR BOYS GATHERED
It seemed all their faces grew
sticky as they watched. Fruit flies stuck to their chins.
Like any soft boy, I am constantly reminded
of how much better I look
inside-out. It was in Kevin’s backyard
where I learned how to swallow
a boot or two.
This was the birthplace of my knees,
new cells coating the gravel, red lesions
like fat worms along my legs.
I didn’t always hate them—the boys I mean.
It was the closest I’ve come to baptism.
Head locked against his naked torso. His sour sweat
burning my eyes shut. That restless timbre
growing in my head, as I pursed my lips and pressed
my face into his ribs, left a trail of saliva
along his bare skin. Muscles withered
and dried out as he pushed me away, disgusted
at how hard my pulse had become
in his arms. This is how the summer opened
its wet mouth, how it wrung the blood
from a body and rebuilt it
from the mud.
BUFFET ETIQUETTE
My mother and I don’t have dinner table conversations
out of courtesy. We don’t want to remind each other
&n
bsp; of our accents. Her voice, a Vietnamese lullaby
sung to an empty bed. The taste of her hometown
still kicking on the back of her teeth.
My voice is bleach. My voice has no history.
My voice is the ringing of an empty picture frame.
:::
I am forgetting how to say the simple things
to my mother. The words that linger in my periphery.
The words, a rear view mirror dangling from the wires.
I am only fluent in apologies.
:::
Sometimes when I watch home movies, I don’t even understand
myself. My childhood is a foreign film. All of my memories
have been dubbed in English.
:::
My mother’s favorite television shows are all 90s sitcoms.
The ones that have laugh tracks. The prerecorded emotion
that cues her when to smile.
:::
In the first grade, I mastered my tongue. I cleaned
my speech, and during parent-teacher conferences
Mrs. Turner was surprised my mother was Asian.
She just assumed I was adopted. She assumed
that this voice was the same one I started with.
:::
As she holds a pair of chopsticks, a friend asks me
why I am using a fork. I tell her it’s much easier.
With her voice the same octave as my grandmother’s,
she says, “but this is so much cooler.”
:::
I am just the clip-art. The poster boy of whitewash. My skin
has been burning easier these days. My voice box is shrinking.
I have rinsed it out too many times.
:::
My house is a silent film.
My house is infested with subtitles.
:::
That’s all. That’s all.
I have nothing else to say
TATER TOT HOTDISH
The year my family discovered finger food
recipes, they replaced the roast duck with a turkey,
the rice became a platter of cheese and crackers,
none of us complained. We all hated the way the fish
sauce made our breath smell. When the women
started lightening their hair, we blamed it on the sun.
When Emily showed up with blonde highlights
and an ivory boyfriend, we all started talking
about mixed babies—overjoyed with the possibility
of blue eyes in the family photo. That year
I started misspelling my last name, started reshaping
myself to have a more phonetic face. Vietnam
became a place our family pitied, a thirsty rat
with hair too dark and a scowl too thick.
We stopped going to temple and found ourselves
a church. That year my mother closed her eyes
and bowed her head to prayers she couldn’t understand.
HIEU HUEY
if you choose to drown leave the amputated limb
in a sea crawling with tradition, begging to be more useful
relax that heavy head and someone else will find it
sinking in a mud pit stuffed with grenade pins,
and when you wake up, the remains of your mother’s home
holding your sore mouth, responsible for false devotion.
start praying that your body will soon reject
the mothers desperate for the bullet shells in your back and their
values won’t turn away that hungry swarm of arrowheads aimed at the sun’s
face, giving you the empty side of the horizon, asking to be left decorating the
dinner table, a cautious compromise, new bodies, splayed, and welcoming
the half-open hands the native land and our new home.
IT WAS THE WINTER WE LEARNED HOW TO PROPERLY SMOKE A CIGARETTE, OR IT WAS THE SPRING WE FINALLY FOUND BROOKE PARKER’S DOG, MANGO, AFTER ALL THE SNOW HAD MELTED
After Daniel’s funeral, we made a papier-mâché piñata
from leftover programs, filled it
with dandelion seeds and tried to beat the wishes out of them. I think
we were nine. I could be lying. But I distinctly remember
you losing your last three baby teeth after your dad bounced your face
off of the garage door. Maybe it was
just a very vivid dream. Nostalgia forgets to visit this street.
It is too busy with tree houses and rope swings.
It doesn’t have time for all of this gray. All of my favorite memories
have been the ones away from home. It might have been
the summer I broke my wrist, or maybe it was the summer
your mom started selling little bags
out of your basement, or maybe it was the summer of both,
when we stuffed our backpacks with cereal
and ran away to a playground three miles from home—
I think we biked, or walked, or maybe it was the summer
you stole your parents’ bright green Buick. We arrived at that sandbox
and ran to the swing set out of habit.
There was no rust there. I didn’t believe I was swinging
cause I couldn’t hear that scrape above
my head, I couldn’t feel the buzz of a saw blade. That land,
a white gown, shapeless and unflattering
in our dingy light. In that foreign America they must consider
the dandelion a weed—not a bouquet
of potential. I remember listening to the other children’s voices
as their porch lights beckoned them home
for supper, ditching their mosquito halos by the tire swing.
How they sounded like children.
How they walked, and jumped, and sang like children.
FLIGHT
after Sam Sax
At the bottom of Heaven’s sliding glass door:
a row of gay boys.Each mistaking death for flight,
and here: the river
looks most like the sky.
And there: a cadaver is siphoned
through the faucet.In a dream: my love
buries me alive. I’ve heard if you die in a dream,
you die in real life—it’s not true. I’ve tested
the lucid edges of nothing,and still wake up.
Still here. Sometimes
you don’t die when you’re supposed to,
and sometimes you do.
Sometimes the gun doesn’t fall
neatly to your side after
the trigger is pulled,
and you are found in the bathtub
with the barrel still hot
in your mouth.
How embarrassing.Caught bursting
at the cowlick.
It’s not what you’d expect,not like the movies at all.
You lose teeth.
GIRLS
The story begins differently in my head—
one version which sounds a lot like laughter
rolling its wet body into the fire and killing
the lights, but my version is more
like four boys standing at the edge of a lake,
unbuttoning their shirts while panties float
to shore. Undressing the timid night,
trying to make out those giggling shapes
we see shifting in the distance, beckoning us
to lay our bodies on the moon’s white tongue,
to feel the water fill the spaces that have gone
untouched. Before the night is done,
before each eager boy is waist-deep
in a song that doesn’t fit in my mouth,
the tide pushed my saltless body back to shore.
Taunting me with a song
that drifted farther and farther away.
THE HAND THAT FED
When I was nine, the dog with no nam
e
bloomed a civilization of hives across my body.
His saliva left me collecting ribbons of skin
underneath my nails, but I loved him
the way I love the relief of scratching.
One day I came home from school
to learn he gained a new home
and a name—I think it was Brownie—
it doesn’t matter. He had a name,
and was no longer mine.
The year I fell into that girl’s ocean
like a lost boat, the year guided
by a burning building instead
of a lighthouse, I started waking
from the thickest hour of sleep to a howling
mutt outside my window, so sure
that he had returned for me. That vengeful
abandoned dander threatening to gnaw
and bubble my flesh, my laughable armor.
When I put a name to it, told her that I loved
her, I could feel my throat beginning to blister.
ARRANGEMENT
my grandmother tells me you are very pretty
your smile not of a girl but of a package
teeth straight and perfectly arranged
like each petal in a bride’s bouquet
your smile not of a girl but of a package
you are presented to me as a trophy
like each petal in a bride’s bouquet
a haunting hiding underneath a veil
you are presented to me as a trophy
in my sheets there’s a continent between us
a haunting hiding underneath a veil
we will sleep in separate beds
in my sheets there’s a continent between us
wedding photos hang in the walk-in closet
we will sleep in separate beds
make a habit out of undressing in the bathroom
wedding photos hang in the walk-in closet
teeth straight and perfectly arranged
make a habit out of undressing in the bathroom
my grandmother tells me you are very pretty
MY FIRST
The car is filling with water so I plug the hole with a pudgy finger.
This always happens to me, which is to say: the ocean
is always happening.
There is a man unzipping his pants
in the passenger seat and a school of shiny fish
in the rear-view, like a sequin gown
brought to life by salt.
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