If I Say My Body is Grieving
Is it American or Vietnamese?
My mother said: Our country no longer exists
My father said: In our language, the same word means green and blue: xanh
My father said: To distinguish between the two,
you say xanh lá: green leaf and xanh da trời: blue sky
My mother’s miscarriage-after-me said: What color was I?
My mother said: In our language, the same word means land and water: nước
My grandmother said: All of language is a metaphor Say what you mean
My father said: If I say I cannot live without nước do I mean country?
My mother said: Vietnam’s body curves like the letter S: serpentine, fragile
My father said: The Mekong Delta translates to River of Nine Dragons because nine tributaries sprawl towards the sea
My mother’s miscarriage-after-me said: Was my salted mouth American or Vietnamese?
My mother said: Don’t translate me
My grandmother said: Don’t speak lest your tongue rushes like a river
In the night, history absconds with us
We learn to open in darkness
My mother said: When you tell it, do I float on land and water?
My father said: Am I the green leaf the blue sky?
My American mouth cannot separate itself from my body
after Athena Farrokhzad's White Blight
ξ
"If I Say My Body is Grieving" first appeared in Nimrod.
Susan Nguyen is a poet based in Phoenix, Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award in Creative Writing as well as awards from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, dialogue, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com.
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