Abecedarian in tiếng Việt
For Hien, my grandmother
1955: Mitchell International Airport. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
A July afternoon. Through the airplane window, a sky
blistered by smog & sutured with steel. Your brother
called Milwaukee a city of baseball & beer &
excess, guarded by the incandescent eyes of a
god named Modernity. Do you believe him? In your dreams, the
heat of Hue spills into your marrow, wet & familiar as
illness. Can you feel it—lychees bursting into sugar &
kites sailing through wind? Your mother’s
lisp, blood-soft in your ear? Tôi đang đợi. Perhaps not—perhaps the
months blur in a fever of lectures & papers & exams, until
November 1, 1955—when, with a stroke of ink, the
ocean thickens into a wall of salt, unbreachable, the
possibility of return sifting into sand between your fingers. War
quickening on the horizon. Helicopter blades spearing sky.
Regret knifes the body: swift & merciless as desire. When you
sing to your bedroom mirror, what does it reveal to you?
Trees split by bullets, & blood softening rice fields — a home,
unraveled? Ash-faced soldiers in the streets, hands stained
violet? Or a university awash in electric light? If you were to
x-ray your chest, what would be etched in silver? Like me, would
you find a pool of hunger & the beginnings of a letter, never sent?
Hannah Han is a Taiwanese-Vietnamese writer from Los Angeles. She has received recognition for her work from the National YoungArts Foundation, the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes, Bennington College, Columbia College Chicago, and The New York Times. Her stories and poems have found homes in Quarterly West, COUNTERCLOCK, and Sine Theta, among others. She studies molecular biology and creative writing at Yale University.