Truong Tran

it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother
weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green
chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels
she too will share in this act of love
my own mother says it was not meant
to be cruel when cruelty she tells me
is a child's lips torn from breast as proof
back home the women wear teeth marks
...

known for her cooking the consistent
perfection of spring rolls evenly fried
her secret to brush it
with just a hint of apple juice
to add some color give some flavor

she is the mother of five a wife
a widow it is easy to forget
her strength in its subtlety
she keeps it hidden

like the smell of apple juice
that reminds me
of my family the eighteen days
we spent on a tanker

the sticky metal floors streaked
with the vomit of children crying
a pearl a day she removed
from a string milky white marbles

on an army issued blanket
a make-shift playground
that kept what was ours
i would have to be good
no crying no complaining
it was mine to keep it was mine to lose

being thirsty that i remember
drinking juice from a can tomato
apple a concoction of both
my mother traded her red jade bracelet

for a jar of water
the kind you drank if you had money to buy
if you spoke korean the kind
that was plain without the taste of salt

she said uống từ từ—drink it slowly
i was given a third of this precious water
the rest she saved hid in a suitcase
...

my father's body is a map
a record of his journey

he carries a bullet
lodged in his left thigh
there is a hollow where it entered
a protruding bump where it sleeps
the doctors say it will never awaken

it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping
mother has her own opinions
bố cùa con điên—your father is crazy

as a child
i wanted a scar just like my father's
bold and appalling a mushroom explosion
that said i too was at war
instead i settled for a grain of rice
a scar so small look closely there
here between the eyes
a bit to the right
there on the bridge of my nose

father says i was too young to remember
it happened while i was sleeping
leaking roof the pounding rain
drop after drop after drop
...

to end without ending on this preposition really i've tried to no avail for translated i am considered not whole of fragments and shards translated i am a shadow of
...

with wages earned on the assembly line he stopped drinking cognac it's worth drinking only in the company of soldiers buys burgundy by the gallon cigarettes by the carton facing the wall in his living room in a chair he sits telling stories in the evenings smoke the silhouette of a woman dancing from tobacco tucked between fingers lips if i could just smoke while sleeping if only she could of stories told the gun he held to a general's head the general who cried hung my promotion i was supposed to be colonel the american officer who ate at his table he described the meat how tender it was simmering in a clay pot i told him names are for people a dog is a dog while on leave as if one could just leave he had his nephews stand guard with plastic rifles tin foil helmets they could have been officers if only they would listen of the stories the one he liked best was about a woman not just any woman my bride to be full of anger and spit and love she cleaved her finger the engagement ring intact in a fit of jealousy she returned it in a box with a note that read I return this ring for you have been taken she discovered my secret my mistress the war
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this is a chronicle written where english is broken sorted salvaged and saved for consumption in time it will be adopted as a delicacy please understand that the metaphor when used here is used out of necessity a grain of rice before all else is really just a grain of rice that striving for clarity looking for an audience wanting to be heard this goes against the nature of things
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that I've been thinking about a way to write this letter to respond to this time to salvage some semblance of what's lost what's lyrical that my student comes to me and says i want to do the work but someone was shot on my street just last night and right now gertrude stein is just plain stupid that she says it and she means it that i am at a loss for words that in another class i tell my students that as writers we are conscious of the world and our words of what is beneath that brick of a poem that even as it is being hurled through a window the glass shattering the child crying the mother sweeping shards into a neat pile of fragments that when lifting up the brick to discard it from memory that she finds meaning hidden on the one side laid flat pressed to the floor that as an adult I saw myself as the boy on the outside unwrapping this brick from a black wool scarf that I was the one who threw it through a window that I can still feel my heart beat in that moment in the past running laughing thinking that I had found pleasure in the breaking of things
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in his memoir the young man wrote chapter after chapter without the use of punctuation his images bled from one to the other his words were nomadic monks roaming the page having exhausted the stories of his young life the man decide he had arrived at an ending he wrote one last line nonchalantly he ended on a period when he woke the next morning he found the white pages void of print
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this book is for my cousin nort who works at a triangle sandwich factory making the kind of sandwiches one buys from vending machines this book is for his commitment to making delicious nutritious sandwiches but even more importantly this book is for the people who eat the sandwiches because they deserve delicious nutritious sandwiches free of preservatives
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he trained obsessively for a chance at the marathon down to the last lunge his body extending for that photo finish in a hundredth of a second though the marathon was considered a test of stamina endurance he thought nothing not even the slightest could be left to chance the whole of his life defined in a word a contest of speed a competition working towards a goal in his haste to train he neglected reading the definition in its entirety and as he had predicted it all came down to a photo finish declaring him the winner by one hundredth of a second in the process of examining this photo finish the judges discovered a hint of brown the color of his eyes serving as grounds for his disqualification in reviewing the rules the fine print stated that the race was limited to those having blues in reviewing the word he realized that his life thus far had been based on the right spelling of the wrong word
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for the you who inspired the writing of this book who forced the hand that lifted the pen who marched the words across the page I speak of you you you and you I speak to the you who hides inside the universal I speak of the you who chooses silence as a form of currency i speak of the you with averting eyes who turns away at the falling of the axe I speak of the you who wash your hands obsessively i speak of the you in the us and the them i speak to the you inside the i i speak that you may know this much that i would gladly consume the rotten core of that apple grown of vengeful thoughts that i would stand unflinching in the path of that brick the same brick i once hurled through a pane glass window that i would take back the jagged and the jaded the gentle and the jarring i would take back every word of every poem on every page i would take it all back in exchange for one wish i wish i wish i wish that this had never happened
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if only i were a dissident poet i could claim my poems were once written in a cell scraps of paper brought to me by a rat on a string if i wrote about the blue skies would you look up point to god in a pillow of clouds if I wrote about the blinding sun would you stare with faith see for the first time i mean truly see if only i were a dissident poet my name its meaning would I then care to know
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approach it as you will but do so knowing that the line which connects the perceptions to the perceived is crossed with the line of the needs and necessities and there at the crossing are the casualties fragments to stories some still struggling to find the beginnings
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i've located you to a letter in the alphabet do not think it wrong of me it is by no means a reduction of your being this is done only so that i may address you free of the inhibitions found in a name they are temporarily submerged if not discarded let's say that you are k and i am t removed from our context t met k in country v t fell in love with k and v the sum of which is a language unrequited
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perhaps in another time our story would be different there would be no leaving and thus no returning you would be the teacher in a northern village and i the fisherman we would live quietly to the background singing of cicadas the whispering of the ocean's breath and poems like weeds would go from the cracks of our lives perhaps in that life the frog and the scorpion are better off as lovers
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a waifish young man in a baseball cap cropped hair and knee torn jeans my taste in men changes with the wind an adams apple wire rimmed glasses they say girls often marry in the image of their fathers he is reading whitman better yet celan on this street a siren screams people rushing to and from their lives a poem on a panel inside a bus sheds its meaning discus starred with premonitions throw yourself out of yourself
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consider the path of a falling leaf the distance in between the branch and the earth the slightest breeze could alter its course now consider yourself as that falling leaf falling falling and where did you come from and where are you now
...