ANAPHORA TO ERASE A LIFETIME, NO THOUSANDS I MEAN by Thanh-Tam Nguyen (Vietnam)

inside her body stayed a country
that’s not even her country. 
inside her amputated leg laid a country
that even when the leg a bleeding ghost already,
the country doesn’t leave
but plead red-iced loyalty. 
inside her families stayed a country 
that refused to realize 
its encampment in their lineages. 

Ma spoons her some medicine
she must take daily
whenever Death 
kindly alights 
from his seat. 

---

but her tongue snarls 
like those red-eyed headlights
brainwashing the man 
whose seatbelts untied, 
baptizing the taste of an unwanted history
documented under her clock-worn veins. 

her life, 
a portion of blood-bathed eventides, 
sealed with corpseless bruises. 
the night reddened-ochre dirt you almost 
mistake it for rotten-dead calves. 
her fate,
stench of crisp-burnt piss 
makes you tilt your nose.
but cremated doesn’t mean unaborted, you know?
 
she has life 
hidden in green-burnt camouflage 
that stayed too hidden 
you can never catch it your bare eyes.
she wears 
suede-brass rage, 
her bones diaphanous stalks
you can never see with your bare eyes.
she tastes 
the dilation of moon-decapitated nights, 
she steals the lights. keep them 
in the pre-collision of her thighs. 
gate-closed? nay she didn’t. 
one move 
and the thighs 
might turn into rubbles of unsheathed sky.   

your fingers,
calloused razors glued to salt-licked fists.
your fist,
stuffed inside her mouths 
and so came apart in your pairs of hands 
clumps of disheveled hair bearing no difference 
to clustered bomb-bright red wires.
your fist,
stuffed inside her mouth and it brought out to you 
those films dubbed in white lies manufactured 
by dirt-streaked euphemisms plucked from 
an earthworm-smeared orchard.  

her body, 
green-upholstered grass they descend upon.
her body, 
a body forgetting the life of itself
but still remembers that it was 
never a Vietnam war, but rather
a faceless child of American’s atrocity.
perhaps, she was the tomorrow i illusioned to have a life.​