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.”