to name something is
to know it
So writes Kimberly Nguyen in the opening poem of her visceral collection, Here I Am Burn Me. And yet, what becomes increasingly clear, page after blood-rimmed page, is that to name something can also be to unknow it—further to destroy it, colonize it, and erase its origins in favor of a master narrative. Nguyen bends that master narrative until it whitens, cracks, and snaps. Rather than rebuild something from those screaming fragments, she turns her back on their hollow breath to inhale a light fashioned in hands washed clean of their conspiracy. She rids herself not only of grime but also of the expectations placed upon her shoulders, already bruised from decades of trauma compressed into the occasional period. This is what she hears.
what’s the difference between war and its aftermath
A question without a question mark becomes a statement of truth. Such linguistic “errors” are highlighted throughout as markers of identity (or lack thereof), even as the tides of history crash against the shores of a geography one can never understand from a distance. Nguyen resists the water and flavors her soul with the salt that makes it fatal to drink yet life-giving to all else. Her voice echoes in bones and eyelids, earlobes and fingernails, ink and cane pulp. In the same breath, that yearning for water becomes explicitly self-defeating—a womb-like existence tempered by the enforcement of maritime mythologies. No matter how landbound we are, the threat of drowning is omnipresent. Thus, the act of writing is never unsubmerged but always subject to the same curling of contaminants. This is what she sees.
violence is not a language
we were born with
Our faith is demonstrated only by the object to which we stitch the threads of our fallible professions. We might have the fullest confidence in thin ice, yet we will fall through it to our deaths; we might have no assurance in thick ice yet make it to the other side without incident. Violence flips this dynamic. Men in suits and other forms of camouflage have confidence in the weapons they worship, some of which far exceed their expectations for destruction. Meanwhile, those coerced into deploying them tremble so that their bodies force an error when training grounds resolve into battlefields. Fire and flame are equal partners in this elemental give and take, each a reflection of the other from night to day and back again. Likewise, every tongue has a sharp side and a dull side, and in her vacillation between the two, Nguyen plants her feet firmly in the squish of their overlap. Shooting down every word traversing that slick surface before it can escape is laborious. This is what she tastes.
i’ll be the one-line poem you take a black marker to,
black out all the parts of me you don’t want to see
In the same way that some of these poems are footnotes, sprinkling their dead skin into places where primary content should never be relegated, Nguyen also sinks her teeth into science, physics, astronomy, and other subcutaneous layers of knowledge. Others are transmissions from outer space to inner, and vice versa. Still others are bifurcated, a conversation with the self, curling in a three-dimensional analogy of a four-dimensional dilemma. Behind closed eyelids, we encounter flashes of war, of Agent Orange, of fields ablaze, of eyebrows singed, of journeys interrupted, of soldiers remembered, of weapons impossible to forget. And while communing with ghosts may be a privilege her father will not share, it is something she offers us maternally, sustaining the crossfire to lay it at our feet. This is what she smells.
a soft place for a sharp word to land
Rarely has such an apt description of the itinerant body been articulated. While the privileged among us spin a globe, close our eyes, and travel to wherever our finger lands, hers get tangled in a blur of ideologies, raking through cities, forests, and oceans as if they were nothing more than the topography of some enormous beast. Cuts and lesions allow navigation in darkness when torches fail to give up their ghosts. Snow is now skin, picked and collected as a record of self-harm as if to prove one’s aliveness by testing the body’s limits. This is what she touches.
you can love a plant and it can still wilt away
Grief is only the conscious delaying of one’s own demise, a reminder that every canon depends on death. The only way to heal an emotional wound is to scribble it out and write another one in its place, ad infinitum. In a world that feeds on lies, killing is the truest act, or so the powers that be would have us believe. Such is the script we follow to ensure success, living out dreams as if they were real, only to realize too late that everything we ever experienced happened to someone else. If a sixth sense is to be found amid the bramble through which we have been dragged, it is knowing that love is not a badge of honor but the thickest scab protecting us from further harm. Thank you, Kimberly, for tracing its contours with such care. We need more of this.
Here I Am Burn Me is available from Write Bloody here.