HOA NGUYEN

DRUMS

Big fucking fat summer clouds
and hear drums  should cloud
with drums and hum with legs

Drumming on skin  a hallow
retort and scooped necked
T-shirts

            I was the
tattered cloth doll pulled
together with stitches

It looks like a wooden doll
the stitches nearly hinges  and harsh
shallows in the sun shadows

I began there    was that
stitch where my metal plates
sing

            Fuck the curse
     a beeping
noise and twerpy watching
the joints and ticklish bits

like a   neon yellow nozzle
on the hose part (nozzle)

It’s a drumming
for oil source    heal the Deep
Horizon      A wish for earth
healing   how our letter

for seas and mourning doves
and creatures of the sea

saying “stay away from the oil”

ALLOTROPIC (WHITE PHOSPHORUS)

This one           most reactive  
      must be stored underwater

Willie Pete

“manner or form”
melter of skin
  that is:      deep      slow healing

  dense white smoke
  rodent poison

A beautiful sparkle splash

tropos for a burn
(light bearer    light beater)

phos    

Tends to stick to the
     surface it strikes

and Willie Pete for the white

Greek meaning “other”
pretty light show going on    allo

Drop elegant tracers     Goes bang
 with a sharp bark

11 SEPT 14

Can cry and alarm
the children

try to explainedness

despite Virgo birthdays
and pop music

of lineage past and future
to become crux of

“You seem mad at me”
(that’s my boy to me)

Cry with an ex-pat
expression        and strange tears after

    Cry for distant girlhood widowed friend

also many dead    alive    relatives

and what history     A colonial victory

                          fucked what if
             fucked as if     

EVE

I could be naked and eating
figs       Instead I’m a rib-woman
howling and chased
by a winged god-baby

My man is embarrassed

           kicked out
           of the world-garden
             to become farmers

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco where she earned an MFA. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX, their home of 14 years. She is the author of nine books and chapbooks including As Long As Trees Last (Wave, 2012) and Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Wave, 2014). She currently lives in Toronto where she curates a reading series and teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University.