She remembers the rituals she had imbued with her own significance: how her ex used to bring her a single flower after every exam, and how she’d watch it wilt on her desk as she studied for the next.

Looking far away, there was only the sign of the Doraemon Tea Shop. Like a borderless white pocket in a fourth-dimensional world, it could be as small or big as you wanted it to be, emitting endless bright light.

I read the flora and fauna in my home as uncannily resilient. / My ancestors’ bodies were presciently small. / Nests accommodate the needs of infestation. / I simply could not live in this house alone.

I do not rule the body / of the girl I love, nor the body / of the girl I was, who is the city / I go home to, which is an island, / which I am always forgetting.

Poems and translations by Red, Lượng Trần, Vũ Anh Vũ & Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên

Sometimes it is easier to call the truth a story or a song. / What some deem repression, I name reflections.

‘My wishes are fulfilled with less searching. / My lover rises with a little waiting. / His fresh moustache conquers the cosmos. / Colored by evening, his mole deceives fate.’

‘The pain entered / me the way the moon / disarms the daya slick blade. / I offered myself as water, / studied its errancy. / What a good citizen, / I thought.’

‘We are given a face, / which means we are given / a vessel of blood to call body, / & lungs–that know the alchemy / of altering wind into breath–the way / plants are always transforming / someone’s last words / into oxygen.’

‘Your mouth a little wound with a little reason to be / involved is why alienation is a body part, which moves / you to harshly ask if death really wanted what it wanted, / if its sole duty is to be observed all the time.’

eating crabs with your fingers pre-Spanish fork and spoon and pre-KFC native chicken you can be served by dancing feathered natives that is true it all tastes good

“The mother, seeing her one-armed son standing in the doorway, was not surprised. It was as she had foreseen.”