Hoa Nguyen
WORKING
NOTE by Hoa Nguyen
I write really slowly, but I thought I'd offer the poems below as they are very much about my practice, the space in which I do my writing: as participant and teacher of creative writing classes. In Teachers & Writers' virtual writing workshop (http://www.writenet.org/virtualpoetrywrkshp.html), I present writing exercises and the class writes from them. The exercises propose using acrostics, half-rhymed word lists, index card vocabulary, found language, mandala meditations, continuous line drawings and other writing strategies. (I also teach writing classes in person here in Austin). The following poems were written from the exercises that I mentioned above.
I do not have an office-y formal writing space. I write in a notebook, a medium-sized artist sketch book, during class (where most of my poems begin), sitting up in bed, on the couch or our front stoop. Photographer Blake Justice kindly agreed to document my writing space and took pictures of me flinching on the couch and on the dusky stairs.
FIVE POEMS
[Hummingbird chimes from Mai 2 years gone]
[Find & fund It's a prison oven]
[Hummingbird chimes from Mai 2 years gone]
Hummingbird
chimes from Mai 2 years gone
She
can’t hear them say, "Would you like to hear
My
voice?" (They don’t say that) Your faith
Becomes
a kind of registered mail
Ricocheting
in imaginary timetables
It’s
terrible
To
tell the elephant destroyer
Time
to "fall back" time
to inspect
The
iffy father and tally resentful icons
You
know she’s gone won’t
eat eggs
Won’t
ever complain because she didn’t
And
looked impeccable and wrapped presents
As
if they were to be given to her
And
not to you or you
[Find & fund It’s a prison oven]
Find &
fund It’s
a prison oven
(U.S.) sterilized
and smells good like
chemicals engines manufactured
houses
Hey
vingpie!
I’m
great and so are you
grooving
on Armageddon gas
where
therapy is tomorrow’s lover’s lane
Pupipara
Groove
in a boob tube
[Pretty headdress on Kidumiel]
Pretty headdress
on Kidumiel
Kick
the angel in the air
Kick
and beat the brilliant air
Adorn
your loud voice
Hurt my
broken grinding kiss
Keep
your pretty headdress house
I
love you, afraid mother
Pure
angel Lameck leave me
infant kisses
on my T-shirt
Let
me bleed fat and big
Slide
alongside my boat
to
mix my years with serpent tears
tracing
the pink fading as a hand
print
exactly because it was the thin
cotton
had embroidered slowly as
your
mother’s fine crimson the crisp
leaves wouldn’t
cut a hand being she looked
at
it rendered in thread but
your back was
turned
doodling roses on a notebook
funny
how the innocent night gown
taking it
out you don’t remember what
it
was you didn’t stitch most
likely
see through light blue garbage chore
maybe
complicated flowers not
taking it
out he came up from behind
surprising like that and your mother joined
you in the bathroom to see to say nothing
is the matter really as it fades there
[Crows and grackles grackles]
Crows and
grackles grackles
in
the sycamore
food cruising
I’m
broke and the sauce burns
I
sprinkle ashes in the flowerbed
I
kiss your cat
It doesn’t
matter that fate can’t rain
and
write flower again
Want
me a handsome bird
black
toenails that curve
West
of Sunny's Wigs
the
goddess Gaia shaking her dirty hair
BIO: Hoa Nguyen lives in Austin Texas where she teaches creative writing and edits the poetry magazine Skanky Possum with her husband Dale Smith. Her second book Parrot Drum is forthcoming from Leroy press this spring. Visit the online poetics journal r e a d m e, for an interview and discussion of her approach to writing, teaching and publishing.
