Poem about Us
We rent a room above the market in Hanoi.
You push the shutters open and squint at the haze—
the street below already restless with the clang of bicycles.
Morning peels open in metal and heat.
Vendors call out the names of herbs: basil, coriander, lemongrass.
You brush a thumb across the sweat on my wrist,
say I look breakable in this light.
Fishmongers lift their silver scales onto blocks of ice.
The smell of star anise threads through the alleys,
tangled with incense burning at the pagoda gate.
Our coffee arrives in chipped glasses.
You read the headline about another flood,
the paper trembling slightly from the ceiling fan’s breath,
leaving a faint smear of ink on your thumb.
You fold the sheet into a narrow envelope and drop it
through the railing into the river’s slow brown current.
“News is only heavy if you keep it,” you murmur.
During the war with America, Vietnamese soldiers hid their letters
inside jars of rice, buried them beneath the floorboards,
to keep them from soldiers’ fires.
Some dampened in floodwater; some turned to ash in shellfire.
Years later, one man returned to claim his words
and found only mildew and silence —
the house a sagging shell, shutters unhinged,
roof tiles scattered like dry leaves.
We leave the market, following the line of red flags toward the river.
I think of those vanished letters,
how small human heat disappears without a trace,
and how your hand almost brushes mine —
as if our nearness, too, might be lost to weather or time or hunger.
We see a girl drags her kite through the dust,
her sandals kicking little flares of sand.
She stops, watching a dragonfly spark green in the sun,
its wings a brief glitter over the road,
its tail catching for a heartbeat in the low electric wires.