For National Poetry Month: "O Tree (Borassus)," "Passenger Pigeon," "After the Murder Ballad"
It’s National Poetry Month! To celebrate, we are publishing new poems by Hoa Nguyen.
By Hoa NguyenApril 21, 2014
O TREE (BORASSUS)
Bud that chops the hill
I was there I clock
foolish making a leaf soup
Napalm is a jellied gasoline
This makes sense: bombs &
the sappy will swings
“Wars are more fun with money”
Pine swung oak-aloof
branch down chainsaw down
Father burning the tent caterpillar nest
What do you see in the fire?
Isolated trees
Palmyra tree
Green blueish leaves
¤
PASSENGER PIGEON
“Martha,” a passenger pigeon named after George Washington’s wife,
was the last of her kind. Immediately following her death in 1914 she was packed
in an enormous 300-pound block of ice and shipped to the Smithsonian.
Turn the metal shoe ring
Sing like the swallow swollen
I mean men
Be the little sparrow
Martha— why “passenger”?
Why wife sew-er?
Darken
like a storm
to pass by
“Your teeth & bone were once coral”
(Niedecker)
and A.C. unit pause and rifle fire
o no Canada Day with Asian
fireworks effects a sovereign dominion
for you know colonial
I pollen
I liveliness and chirp
The poet Juvenal declared
“I hate a woman who reads”
The quick big water changes
Die
in Cincinnati zoological gardens
Afterward:
In June 1974, she returned to the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens for the dedication of a new building named in her honor. Both times she was flown first class, with an airline flight attendant escorting her for the entire trip.
¤
AFTER THE MURDER BALLAD
Bringing some other fine things
hard full life atoms springing
No money No fine things
Flatteringly we are the cave
It will be OK in disgrace
She jumped Came to the river
deep water Thou restless ungathered
orphan Tell me your mind
to mend to drown you in despair
Let me sing gone
If I can live kicked & chocked
Turned around in deep water
¤
LARB Contributor
Hoa Nguyen is an American poet, editor, and publisher. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University.
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