Vang - Afterland: poems

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-770-2 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-964-5 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2017 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016938843 Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design Cover photo: Matt Black / Magnum Photos For the ancestors

This rotation is my recipe, The telling of every edition As a landscape on slow windshields. The body no longer Baskets fatigue, No envelope with oxygen left to cure. When funeral recites The supper gardens of my forefathers, Cross-stitch from my mother kin, Then I will come to you Dressed in my armor of earth, Ready as you chant my tale. When I reach the sloped halls And hammock sun, I wont tell why the split orchid Falls behind. Instead, I tell why it arrives.

Now theyve ended the war. The American has gone home. Your Hmong village is a graveyard. Do you think of your missing wife, how the Pathet Lao dragged her naked, screaming, and bleeding by her long black hair, deep into forest shadows. Or your sons head in the rice pounder, shell-crumbled. And your brother, the youngest who followed you into combat.

It was scalpel that day they captured you both. They sliced off and boiled his tongue, forced it down your throat. Do you think of the American returning to the coffee cup, new linens in a warm bed, pulling into the driveway. Sorry about your mountains , they say, here is the last of the ammunition , a few cases of grenades . Do you picture him reading the morning paper, turning on the nightly news. Maybe you clench your rifle closer, sling your elegies to your back, hold them as a newborn baby.

You will wait for hours in ragged fatigues with others abandoned swarming the dirt runway, shoving toward the locked aircraft door among the scattered shoes, shirts, blouses, suitcases thrown out. What grief-song erupts when you see the last American plane take off, distant above Long Cheng. How loud do you beg in your gut, pleading to some invented god or ancestor or politician: all of our thousands who died on your side , why wont you authorize another plane .

I am a skin of sagging curtain. I am a bone of bullet hole. I am locked in the ash oven of a forest. Peb yog and we will be . The sky sleeps quilted in a militia of stars. Someone has folded gold and silver spirit money into a thousand tiny boats.

Peb yog hmoob and we will be . I am hungry as the beggar who cracked open a coconut to find the heart of a wild gaur. Hmoob and we will be . The tree is more ancient than its homeland, shedding its annual citrine as hourglass dripping honey. Peb yeej ib txwm yog hmoob . I dig and dig for no more roots to dig.

I soldier with my severed legs, my fallen ear. Ive become the shrill air in a bamboo pipethe breath of an army of bells.

Our howling knees Are empty. Home wages Ear-splitting nightmares. I keep your torn jacket, Talisman of escape, Sweetly-clutched as a guava From our childhood. When I see you again, Well build refuge From newest boughs Like the praying mantis Who sinks into frigid leaves.

Another convoy leaves the kiln. The crowded dead turn into the earths unfolded bed sheet. We drift near banks, creatures of the Mekong, heads bobbing like ghosts without bodies, toward the farthest shore. With every treading soak, the wading leg, we beg ourselves to live, to float the mortared cartilage and burial tissue in this river yard of amputated hearts.

But dont linger if a man swallows a bomb. When they burn the olive trees, wait a little more. Paint yourself with ash from the last branch. Wait for the sky to blister outward, all over. The world moves with you in gradients of orange and red. When a far-off noise murmurs your name, it is the devil disguised as a hound.

Ants are spies for the dead. The cyanide in your left coat pocket. Mines have been planted. Sometimes your eyes hide apparitions. Sometimes your eyes just hide. The moon draws close you could throw a rock and hit it.

Wait for torches to whistle. A lasting call. The genius moment. Think of a candle that goes boom in your chest.

Soldiers came one day To steal their offering of men. With baby, I ran to the forest. We hid beneath The claret shrubs. Then his cries, and I pushed Opium in his mouth. Now nothing, no sound, As I shake here In the arms of a liana, Whisper my crumbs into prayer: Birth coat, it wont be long Before he re-clothes In the lit needlework of you .