Thank you so much for sharing this! I love the opening especially, with its percussive musicality and bold imagery (“while you were / yellow and your arms were crossed in a coffin, while you were / still among the living,all you did was yell”). The same jarring ambivalence of the speaker towards the “you” is reflected in the sharp, rhythmic sonics, especially towards the ending (“shake a canister . . . . counted / how many lines . . . “. I love how the Vietnamese names and the choppy quality of the mother’s unconventional English participates in the sonic fragmentation of the poem, organically becoming part of the its clanging (almost angry) vocabulary of motion. A powerful piece.

Thanks so much again,
The Editors

I was glad to see you die. But before that, before you turned
yellow and your arms were crossed in a coffin, while you were
still among the living, all you did was yell. All that I remember is
the yelling. You were thin as me, Uncle, a seven-year old girl. You
were so happy when brother was born. Finally, after mother’s
misfortune of bearing two girls, here was a boy. First time I ever
saw you laugh. And then I saw you in the hospital. Three packs a
day at thirty-two and now you can’t even taste the salt and grease
on your KFC.

Santa Clara St., downtown San Jose. It was an ugly Santa Fe-style
building, a rectangular adobe with white paint chipping off its
bones. The monks inside chanted Nam Mô A-Di-Ðà Phat for
you, I could only take five minutes of it at a time. Then I’d leave
to hang out at the drug store next door, other times I was at the
movie theatre down the street. Once the monks stopped
chanting, people came to take your coffin, took it and shoved it
through an oven door in the wall. The doors closed and then
flames started shooting.

Mother made me burn incense and pray for her whenever we
visited your picture at Chùa Ðuc Viên. She told me to ask for her
prosperity and for me to do well in school. We’d visit on your
anniversary, New Year’s, and during the Moon Festival. She’d
shake a canister until one of the bamboo reeds fell out, counted
how many lines there were, and then she’d run to the shelves to
find the corresponding fortune. If she didn’t like what the scroll
said, she would pass the can to me. “No! Both hands! Shake strong.
Speak clear. Maybe they not hear me.” They don’t hear me, either.

Information is also available on the Hannon Library web site: http://hanlib.sou.edu/events/stafford.html