7.18: Nguyen, Hieu Minh. "The Study" and "White Boy Time Machine- Override" (2018)
- Page ID
- 40467
The Study
For the longest time, the only memories I had
of that year were of Little Billy from the third floor,
floating
dead in the pool & how angry the rest of the tenants
were 5
when they drained & filled it with cement
& how that summer, the unbearable heat dragged its
endless skin
across our bones — memory is the funniest character in
this story: 10
when I think of that year, no one has a face — the first
memory
I had of being molested did not come until nine years
later.
At first I thought it was a dream, a movie, white noise 15
summoning a narrative through the static — if it's true
what they say about memory being a series of rooms
then behind some locked door: a wicked apothecary: her
fingers
trapped in jars, her hair growing like wild vines along 20
the walls.
Somewhere in this story I am nine years old
filling the loud hollows with cement to down out the
ghost.
They say, give us details, so I give them my body. 25
They say, give us proof, so I give them my body.
If you cut me open, if you dissect me you will pull from
me:
a pair of handprints, a nine-year-old boy, fossilized.
White Boy Time Machine: Override
No matter where we go, there's a history
of white men describing a landscape
so they can claim it. I look out the window
& I don't see a sunset, I see a man's
pink tongue razing the horizon. 5
I once heard a man describe the village
in Vietnam where my family comes from.
It was beautiful
a poem I would gift my mother
but somewhere in the pastoral I am reminded 10
a child (recently) was blown apart
after stepping on a mine, a bulb, I guess
blooming forty years later—
maybe it was how the poet said dirt
or maybe it was how he used fire 15
to describe the trees.
Contributors and Attributions
- Hieu Minh Nguyen is an award-winning, "queer Vietnamese American poet based out of Minneapolis" ("About"). These poems originally appeared in Not Here (2018) and are used with permission and are licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 by Hieu Minh Nguyen and Coffee House Press.