Autonomous Song, and: The Flying Motorist Artist, and: Red She Broke the Cup, and: Sings the Wishing Well (The Ghost Well-Cared For)
- Autonomous Song, and: The Flying Motorist Artist, and: Red She Broke the Cup, and: Sings the Wishing Well (The Ghost Well-Cared For)
Autonomous Song
Refusing the motherland mother-role
Delta girl plotting a runaway plot
No waiting-in-shadows-life for us
Her love of colonial electric lights motorbikes cursed roses Xmas
The handsome singing of “Que será será”
Barren thorns to plunge
Bouncing light spillson the Butterfly Loversof Chinese legend
A frenzy of magenta flowersto devour [End Page 73]
The Flying Motorist Artist
At twelve Diệp didn’t have a half-cent : entrance fee to see the circus performance
When she was twelve three motorcycle performerstraveled from Thailand to Cần Thơ
I thought they werefrom the Philippines? No Thailand
A motorcycle act that came to her provincein the lower Mekong Delta joining a country fairfor the New Year 1954
everywhere we came to see contortionists
fortune tellers displays of snakesto exchange caged birds
she the disobey
Diệp done with farm chores
(washing clothes seeing to chickens but never the kitchen [End Page 74] she made things burn or break they said spilledrice in the dirt bad luck they saidand banned her)
Recall that one Seerand her mad possession: spirits in the bellysuddenly enlarged round and hard
When she saw the Palm Reader they made tell of a sailboat
“Come see the Flying Motorist Artist!
RIDING SHADOWS ON THE WALL OF DEATH RIDING SHADOWS ON THE WALL OF DEATH
Watch them defy death on The Wall of Death!”
( danger perpendicular their reaching hands )
Two men a lone woman riding her name loudloud and loud
motorbike flying
The wooden wall roars [End Page 75]
Red She Broke the Cup
A glimpse at what is failedexiled from heavento assist / those suffering /those in peril
A bivalency and her power: 1. Snakes 2. Amphibians 3. Owl ‘wh. takes night for day’ 4. Bat ‘half bird half mammal’ 5. Rooster who oracles the day
etc.
Lady of the Land who laughsa belly-centered cry
drunk from the starsdear Lady Queen of Sky
of Forest ‘hearer of the world’s cries”
as Water clothed in white [End Page 76]
Sings the Wishing Well (The Ghost Well-Cared For)
in the story the men get to livethe wife faithful dies her deathis pious strangled stars bangle
gather floating flowers underworld yourself
a beautiful dreamer in the mosquito mythwith visions of owning a grand houseshe grows ill in the fields diesis arrayed in a field of flowerssaved by blood magic she later betraysdoomed to live as nuisance begging begging
don’t goagain I call newly floodedfields of rice farm girl sitson the flood wallsings the wishing well
we sing her story beyond time
wield feathers and clouds of her
a melted floating love gem
our tears mix with tears
I have no sacred rites for you saving the sacredgrove you grew [End Page 77]
Born in Vinh Long and raised and educated in the United States, Hoa Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011. Her books include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008 and Violet Energy Ingots which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. Hoa teaches in Miami University’s low residency MFA program and the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College where she serves as co-chair of writing. Her forthcoming book, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, will be published in April 2021 by Wave Books.
