NGHIEM TRAN

Afterward

Left in that room––
I couldn’t move. My limbs splayed

in formation of cross, pinned
beneath a dark

oceanic and salt-rimmed.
I fingered for clothes cloistered

in secret shame. He left
my skin raked and red, the foliage

of my hair still wet. I did not, I did not:
ask for love and the room heaves

a gelatinous mass of bodily pulp.
He was soldier. He was martyr

whom we made excuses for. The hot tongue
of a fever in my ear

whispering obscenities. Dog in heat.
I was child. A hand on the cheek

was love. The hand moves
down

and it is something else entirely.

Union

Desire’s ruinous basilica,
where the bronze bells shriek.

There is no wedding,
no doves suspended in light. It is siren-

song off the plank,
Termite-ridden, meek: the ocean beneath

endless and treacherous
as a mind scorn

after an affair. The stain-glass
image of the ideal shatters. He was

no Christ
worth the pilgrimage

into self-doubt and desert heat.
Tread

from the mirage wedded
out of neurons

and oxytocin firing
in excess. All the promises

a union makes
can be achieved by the self,

the wild sassafras strangling
the cross.

Imitations

Ignorance crouches
behind my eyes, bush-weed brown,

in the thicket of the skull.
An hour of conversation,

of distances melting into honey:
our voices savored.

Then an experience unknowable
to the self.

You were born in war.
And I among peace.

My prosperity nuzzling your breasts
dry and cold. The dark ardor

behind a pale veil. You say my happiness
is what you live for. But Mother,

who can bear such responsibility?
Something in me cries for malignancy

with tendrils and hooks. I’ve already
failed you. Your voice holds too many

hues of the past. Which songs to pluck
out of the woods? Night falls.

And the beast stalks my bed.
My imagination flares red

with horrors: mere imitations
of what you went through.

Still I cower, still I sweat.

Apparitions

How suffocating––
the heart that wants,
the sea that pleas: red, unbroken.

Tonight I walk
to the edge of my life,
where the woods

enclose me.
These apparitions in the dark:
moonlight on the bark.

I see the faces
of my possible lives,
silver, spasmodic.

They dissipate
when I reach out. The leaves fall.
The branches bare:

my skeletal remembrance.
Who do I call
to bring love’s scent

to this darkening foliage?
The landscape is bleak, bleak, bleak.
I search and falter,

my hands dead and mute.
The storm comes. Lightning but no
rain. The world illuminates:

O’ it is vast.
How does anyone
stay still, in their patch of earth,

when the distances beckon
like a lark,
like a lark.

Nghiem Tran is a Kundiman Fellow. Writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, wildness, The Indiana Review, and elsewhere.