After Janel Pineda’s “In Another Life”
The war never happened and Saigon
_____never changed its name.
Bố Mẹ are lounging in neon plastic chairs, he sips
_____cà phê sữa đá while she spoons chè ba màu.
My sisters and I would be born
_____under humid air, the tips
of our tongues curled out to lick
_____its sweetness. Our mouths, wide
and spherical, like a globe,
_____like the Vietnamese word
for “to live.” We live here,
_____chúng tôi ở đây.
Forget the kicked down doors,
_____the black boots, the red flag.
There is no blood-stained soil,
_____no agent orange skies.
There are only yellow mai flowers
_____against a backdrop of green
mangoes and pandan leaves.
_____In this life, we are not haunted
by dying bodies, barely held up
_____by brittle bones,
nor our skin weathered by a relentless
_____sun. No one is left
behind the 17th parallel.
_____Grandparents smell their grandbabies
feet, fatten, never flatten by gravity,
_____like a ripe grapefruit begging to fall.
The whirring of bicycle wheels
_____or the scatter of flip flops
racing to school, to home,
_____to karaoke, impatient to let out
a flame in song and tenderness.
_____Pops and snaps can be heard from novelty
fireworks thrown into the streets for Tết
_____followed by the thrill of children’s squeals
as they stare into the sparks, reminding
_____them of the never-ending light of the stars.
Bố does not cover his ears
_____from the voices inside his head,
nor my sisters searching for a place to hide,
_____or Mẹ crying because there is a hole in her purse.
When we go out to swim, I will not
_____fear the waves casting me aside, making
me invisible. Instead, our bodies bend
_____along its folds, floating to the top,
roaring back to land, “Keep dinner warm,
_____we’ll be home soon.”
Thi Nguyen is a California native, born in San Jose from Vietnamese refugees, and currently lives in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in creative writing, focusing on poetry, from the University of New Orleans (UNO). Her poems ruminate on issues of identity, family dynamics, and the passage of time and have appeared in Ghost City Review, Frontier Poetry, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been recognized with Honorable Mention for the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize and the Academy of American Poets Award in 2024. You can check out her website at https://thinguyenpoetry.wordpress.com/.
Horatio Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American photographer and filmmaker currently based in New York. His on-going photo series “Chim Trời Cá Nước” touches on the themes of resettlement, home, migration, and cultural-hybridity within various Vietnamese-American communities across the United States. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Bloomberg, PBS, the Wall Street Journal, and various other publications. Visit his website and his Instagram.
