American Mixtape
Song in which the TR-808 is more American than the Stratocaster
Song that makes us feel halved, then doubled
Song that tempts my father to accompany Saigon’s finest crooners
Song written for a kung fu movie
Song written by a bird who samples the grooves and ridges of her father’s tongue
Song in which the singer sees himself in every ant colonizing his kitchen
Song in which foreign rain falls in triple-time, like suppressing fire
Song in which the Vietnamese words for nation and water elope in a French sedan
Song in which a national park dreams of becoming an ashtray
Song that imports dreadlocks to Chengdu
Song in which Ronald Reagan proclaims himself stepfather of trap music
Song performed for a series of focus groups charged with writing a
Song in which the TR-808 is more American than the Stratocaster
Song in which my father cries in front of his children
Song livestreamed
for an audience of one
Family Altar Diptych
I.
To acquaint the body with itself leave the mind unread
Sacrilege knows no bounds but the ones it breaks and why should it
I never behaved myself at deathday meals and now that I’m abroad
my little brother sets the table for family ghosts and their plus-ones
When a cousin dies unbodied hollow winds people a tomb
If you never escaped by boat you need not disembark
Ma, be unafraid of soaps and medicines we co-own the sinking house
Some days our tongues are shrines for words we can’t pronounce
II.
In a shawl of incense smoke an ancestral cardinal labels you
yellow, a class traitor how I’d love to knit gossip with her
Between the Buddha and his Kalashnikov a well-oiled grammar
Perhaps I will come back as a horsefly at the throat of your god
Ba, hone your whining into hope itself alchemist of brittle verbs
A son cannot be a whetstone for your dead language
One day we will tumble down the well only to discover it’s a pond
whose long-blind koi gulp the sky and spit it back up mistranslated
Coda.
Immigrant hearts hatch grounds to flutter death a failure of motion
Death is a failure of motion
Steven Duong is a Vietnamese American poet from San Diego, California and a student of English at Grinnell College. The recipient of several awards, including an Academy of American Poets University and College Prize, he has poems featured or forthcoming in Salt Hill, Academy of American Poets, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Sugar House Review, The Penn Review, and other venues. He currently lives in Iowa with loved ones.