VIETNAM
NHA TRANG, 1975
My brother’s cries—
higher than bombscream,
higher than birdcall—
pierced my blanket.
We had to leave Nha Trang,
flee the lowlands
where my fathers rinsed
their feet in mud-colored water
every spring.
If sound were color, the cries
of my brother were pearl
and orange.
No time for photographs
or clothes. The balsam plane
my uncle made for me
would have to stay;
my mother’s slippers
remained on her feet
as she kissed my head and waved.
My sisters came naked
to the doorway. I’d be forced to rebuild
their unusual smiles,
their nursery songs
and demands.
THE ARTIST IN MASSACHUSETTS
There’d been no time for breakfast,
the kiss of hands, last thoughts,
so the need to remember,
the need to remember Nha Trang
grew the art inside me:
unremarkable boats, shorelines
of broken trees, faces:
schoolchildren, aunts slumped
exhausted, the city’s squat
fortresses of rock
with countenances they called gods,
what the gunners couldn’t break.
They admired what I did remember,
forgave my lapses, the way
I wore my hair at fourteen.
I was an American,
no matter the accent,
no matter my concealed cravings
for bánh cuốn and bánh xèo,
the folds of my mother’s skirt.
The girls whose fathers
worked in Boston were beautiful,
and I drew them in secret.
Their startled eyes
made me suspicious of my own.
THE NHAT TAN BRIDGE
i.
Because the faces drew against me,
I stand atop the Nhat Tan Bridge, Hanoi,
new in old skin.
Stacked photographs of war
remind us how the land
drew against itself, so we can’t imagine
beams of silver, stone,
trucks filled with kitchens, gowns,
girls stepping into them
in American-style bedrooms.
ii.
I take my daughters for lunch
at Nha Hang Ngon. The man
flips spring rolls and smiles,
sensing I’m a foreigner, a lost boy.
My mother’s were not better,
but she was forced to be another
by war, and I recall the salt on her wrists,
her eyes remembering the girl
she’d been. I dare not tell my daughters
this. American with the given
of prom gowns, they might laugh at me.
iii.
We eat. I watch Tai’s wrists
move sullenly, Lian’s eyes scan the street
for fallen things: funeral flags, silk,
the tear and flash of my mother’s eyes—
and always the distant bridge.
This is not what I meant
when I told them I’d remember,
Tai and Lian pausing now,
sensing this is still a battered
and dangerous land.
HANG QUAT STREET
They call Hanoi
a paradise of rats and gamblers,
men in uniforms
waiting for buses,
the clouds
that move from Hang Quat Street—
where before the war
men sold feathers and gems
that made ladies tremble.
They said the theaters
were mystical in 1952.
I had a vision of being there
the night my brother’s shrimp boat
burned in Galveston Bay.
Ten years an American,
I considered the land
in crescendos,
women who looked away
or didn’t look at all. Still,
I drew them
in the language I’d forgotten.
I drew them standing in the rain
on Hang Quat Street
in the posture of my mother.
I drew their hands
falling away
like the hands of my ancestors.
THE HIGHWAY TO SAIGON
We grew used to Hanoi’s glow—
even the buildings
from the hotel window
bore surfaces stenciled
blue and gold. I rose to shave
as my daughters lay dreaming
not of New York, but these streets
they never had the chance to know,
these men in hats drawing xich lo
down Hang Bac, the parlors
filled with portraits of the dead.
But now the ghosts of poverty
claim their penance. The highway’s
riven with seed, widows
bearing disease in their breasts,
old men who cannot reconcile
war with now. They’ve no synonyms.
They’ve no way to know
what was lost and gained.
I’m an American in a space
that was never mine. I’m New York
and Boston, which are points
on maps in village kitchens.
We stop near Quang Ngai. A woman
comes with a platter of fruit.
Her husband, shouldering a scythe,
asks us why we’ve come at all,
for the North took his babies
and the rain while I was away.
Too windy and late to argue,
I drink my tea and look out past
his field. There are cylinders
of something I can’t remember.
LIAN
Hanoi’s smog lifts to reveal
cobalt lines of factories,
Lian’s distant cousins
disappearing on motorbikes.
She traces her thumb
on the long window
of Terminal 3. She’s happy
to be going back to Nyack
and high school, The Next Step.
She told me on this trip
she wants to be a dancer—
I remember the way
her legs moved that morning
in Trung Hoa among the sellers
of catfish and herbs.
I rediscovered home,
re-drew what I’d forgotten,
but home’s initials
are evanescent and broad,
and Lian carries nothing
of borders and war
in her skin. Perhaps one day
she’ll bring her own family
here to retrace my ways,
how I wept in secret
on Linh Nam where the boys
sell newspapers. I wept
for the ink on their hands,
the hair we shared.
They are calling no more.
Lian holds her boarding pass
the way a bride holds
her husband’s hand
as they go out from the church
into the disconcerting sun
of a Saturday afternoon.
***Carl Boon lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Two Thirds North, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, and Sunset Liminal.***
SICK LIT MAGAZINE 