1 FALL
The more I ask
the more is asked
of me. My mother asks
for nothing
except a simple life
—work work work—
Never why,
never I. Bird-mother,
bird-child,is it true?
We return to our source
no matter how we escape
who-what-when-where
we’re from. Nest built
from trash, limb of coral
trees, the Torrey Pines:
I’m sorry I called
our home a cage.
I’m sorry I asked so much
of my life, yours.
Banished,
all we deserted
we can’t hurry back to,
though we know the way,
though it exists
somehow, somewhere.
Yesterday, you called
to say you missed me.
That’s false. Regret,
its chiseled stone,
struck us both.
2 WINTER
Against the lamp
light, a shadow
on the bed. Or was it me,
me, a trap door, a hole
I fell through, plunging
to the underworld,
where Ngài Mục Kiền Liên
feeds his mother
white rice from a begging
bowl. Her mouth
catching fire each time
a grain grazes her lips.
How do we consume
if consumption destroys
us? How do we retain
what we know
we can’t? Ngài Mục Kiền Liên
barters his soul
so his mother can go
free: more than Demeter
could do for Persephone,
my mother for me.
Though she now kneels
before him, before all
the spirits in heaven
every night—Spare
my baby its body, its bounty
—it’s too late. I ate,
so I must stay. I must pay
or there’ll be no spring.
3 SPRING
I’m thinking of an early morning
in April 1975. The ocean
a bronze bell before it shivers
with sound.The last days
of a war that’ll last forever.
Bà ngoại, is this what it’s like
to be a mother, to watch
your child abducted
by flight? I’m thinking of a girl,
her yellow dress.
The wind lifting its hem
like a love she’ll never meet
again. A love waiting for her
on the other side
of a collapsed bridge
with no keel in sight.
I’m thinking of the song
they sang—Thương anh
thì thương rất nhiều
mà ván đã đóng thuyền rồi—
the song she sings me
only in dreams—Đa đoan
trời xanh cắt cánh lìa cành
khiến chim lìa đôi. Bird-
mother, is this what it’s like
to be a child, to suffer
the seasons of my life, migration
lacking the promise
for reunion? I’m thinking
this is why—
4 SUMMER
Season of reap,
season of sow:
like rain, I pass through you
to get here. Everything
I touch, everything
touching me, changes me.
I’ve hurt so many with my greed.
Another stranger
in the doorway, another
stranger in my bed
with a plate of Korean pears,
a bowl of coconut sticky rice.
Or was it me, seeking a reason,
any reason at all, to exist
beyond this lonely hour
haunted by the song
I heard once in a dream.
Like Ngài Mục Kiền Liên,
my mother crosses the river
to the underworld, smuggles me
to earth. I’m reborn
a black dog at her feet,
lapping gutter-water,
feeding on my own excrement.
Punished for want,
punished for not wanting,
I didn’t think I could be saved.
I didn’t think I could kiss
my reflection in the waves
and not surge with flames.
PAUL TRAN is a Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net-nominated poet. Their work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, RHINO, which gave them an Editor's Prize, & elsewhere. They are the first Asian American in twenty years to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam & Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed Top 10. They received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, Poets House, Lambda Literary Foundation, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Home School Miami, Vermont Studio Center, The Conversation, & Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Paul lives in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing & Poet In Residence at Urban Word NYC.