Frog legs

No weighing down of the body is worth the leaps up,

except for when the legs were golden

on a plate every Saturday; then there’s no

leaping away. Mighty sinew —

My mother knew I’d tear clean to the bones

and chew, the crunch a singing in my mouth.

Đình¹“Đình”: village communal house. pillars

There are surely better ways to spend summers in her hometown

than hugging pillars, but my mother said

if I could wrap my arms around one, that means

I’ve grown taller than her, that means

on her own she has raised daughters that endure.

My fingertips stretched so hard for each other

that patches of my skin turned to wood.

Hers

which she once apologized for giving me.

Boats

Yet I can’t float, unlike my mother

who lied on the surface of Cửa Lò Beach

with the buoyancy of an ageless raft and the serenity of the breathless.

I held onto her still body when I gave up

swimming, and when the sun set, glided her to the shore

by the tip of her toe, wondering what it’s like

to be weightless.

Banana blossoms

Their bruise-color a warning.

Hers

where I pillowed on and in my siestas, dreamt that

my hair was stitching up the skin fissured by my birth.

Hers

Every morning I watched her getting dressed, and

for the last step, she’d grab and squeeze

as if her thighs were necks to strangle.

Release. Ask me, if the dangle

of her flesh made her look monstrous.

The first time I had a girl’s weight

on me, I flinched as if singed by the press

of her palm on my thigh, thinking she was also

trying to reshape it smaller. Instead she smoothed it out

like a cat belly and kissed it. I want to tell my mom

that story sometime, just the cat belly part. I want to ask

when was the last time her flesh was held — not at gunpoint

by her eyes; by someone else’s hands, tenderly.