Poetry: Two Poems by Steven Duong
Steven Duong’s poetry ripens with bodies, the struggle of skin—and he uses them as locus centers from which he can reach out to disparate realms of the universe and time to make new things of the old: ancient Rome and Vietnam, graveyards and koi ponds, sickness and the bloom of nature.
the heat death of the universe between your aorta and your pulmonary artery
i believe you when you tell me
an aching body intends
to bloom today i feel choked
groves of bamboo struggling to evacuate
me seeking asylum
by piercing the way a secret buried in the body
exits first through the eyes
then the wrists the pond in my skull
a graveyard the koi i stocked it with swallowed
by the largest the mind is
a cannibal
when it needs to be the swollen carp surfaces
like an ambulance rounding the corner
on the day it came for you we snapped
at each other until you capsized your breath
swam off for the first time i saw
the heart of your illness as more than the white line
partitioning your back i felt victorious
then fatal was your oxygen mask a fishing boat
or an escape vessel did nero
play the lyre as he
watched saigon burn did your anh hai have a pen
on him when he peopled
the boat and left you ashen when do you feel most
ill do you see yourself
dangling from rooftops
the way i do should i take my own advice
like crushed hydrocodone can you
hold me tight ma
self-portrait as patent ductus arteriosis
you had your first taste of recovery / sometime after / the heat death / of the universe between your aorta & your pulmonary artery / a lucky sort of collapse / it landed you / right where you wanted to be / which is to say / not saigon / not sick / at least not as sick as you were in saigon / do you remember how it felt / on your lips / your tongue / the hollow room of your breath / it must taste so good in real time / the time between breaths / the time at which breath emigrates / freely from the body / is still so foreign to me / i wish i was home for tet / this year / i wish i could bless myself into unopened envelopes / firecrackers / tipsyred smiles / the way salt / blesses itself into a wound / i wish a blessing was more than a wish / cut fresh each year / wrapped in a crisp twenty / i wish i could tell you i’ve scarred / in the year since our last tet / that every blessing on my floor is a wish / and not a crumpled history / but ma / this one fits in your hand / like a razorblade / a prayer bracelet if you hold it / tight enough.
Steven Duong
Steven Duong is a poet and writer from San Diego, California and a senior English student at Grinnell College. The recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize, he has poems featured or forthcoming in Passages North, Salt Hill, Pleiades, Diode Poetry Journal, Poets.org, Rust+Moth, Columbia Poetry Review, and other venues. As a 2019 Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellow, he will soon be embarking on a year-long writing project called "Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment" in Malawi, China, Thailand, and Trinidad and Tobago. Right now, he lives with his lovely friends in Iowa.
