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5.18: Nguyen, Hieu Minh. "The Study" and "White Boy Time Machine- Override" (2018)

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    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 drown 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

    This page titled 5.18: Nguyen, Hieu Minh. "The Study" and "White Boy Time Machine- Override" (2018) is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jill Bonds.