the blueshift journal

After the redguards marched into Saigon

my father fled and left a box of

letters written in a cursive hand

beside the table where grandmother

kept her dentures.

​

In Minnesota I would sometimes

catch him writing them again,

bent over the

oak table with its third leg

propped up by a jar of

tea leaves.

​

His fingers would circle around

the handle of the brush. Horsehair lush

and blackened by the ink pot.

The paper crumpling, folding underneath

the weight of all those foreign words.

​

They were for mother,

who was always sleeping

in some lamplit corner

of the city. The city on the postcard

and in the picture frame.

​

Sometimes father would press my curls

against his fingers and

remember. My hair jet black and

ink leaving no trace.

​

My father did that often,

using his hands to

close up times and distances.

The maps and scrolls

folding into

opposite dimensions.

The letter pressed delicately

against the envelope.

​

He would write mother’s name with

a sharp reed emerging from the a.

The vowels held together

in between his heavy fingers,

his margin lines, arthritic,

curved and shaking.

​

In Minnesota I write letters

onto your pale forearm.

Blades of grass brush against your skin

like curled accents. Your lips remind me

of the pale dot sometimes floating

slight above an o. I try to hold your

shiver in my fingers, hold in them

the slipping syllables

of your tongue.

​

A recluse spider crawls up the curve of

your thumb. You hold it up in front of you

and smile. Its spindle limbs combing

the border of your skin. The maps traced out

by spinnerets in ink. The ink made out of reeds and curls

like waves breaking onto the shores

of Saigon.

​

To hold you on that boundary line again.

Between the horsehair of the brush

and the old shoreline smell of crinkled paper.

Between the redguards

and the lapping coast.

​

Between my mother’s curls and mine,

the waves of my curls breaking against yours,

our curls jet black and spilling out onto the grass,

writing the earth and Saigon

endless letters.