Flying Dream

A Poem about the dignity of land

Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash

Dear my friends,

When I think of the Mekong Delta, I always show up in the memory as a child, sitting on an old diesel-stinking bus, waiting hours for a ferry crossing the Mekong River to my grandma’s home, seeing street vendors selling giant mangoes and sweet fermented meat in banana leaves.

The land bears quiet memories that I often visit in my head whenever my life gets rough. But times changed. The place changed. Mekong Delta has been in trouble.

Serious droughts happen, and salt intrusion comes back every year. People lost their crops and flocked to the city to become factory workers. As a child of the land, I see her lose her dignity.

What is the dignity of a place? The poem doesn’t mean to answer that.

Flying Dream

That night and some nights on 
I slept by her in our land’s brothel
Her bed, thousand men’s sweat-soaked 
in pursuit of her rising hips 

But the night was licking its wound
to cover liquid marks in lemongrass
dripping from her hair, bathing her.

In the morning, she left a bánh mì 
on the dampened couch 
I chewed the crispy roasted pork skin 
spurring scent of desire ghosts

At noon she asked me to get out 
customers yearn for her singing nipples 
Her pale skin: the land of misty soil 
mounting their hard-ons until blistered 

I sat by the babbling sewage 
fuming in spilling bubbles
Her utter of pleasure vaporizes 
the men oinked

Twilight sat on a soggy blanket
Saigon sparkled between her matted hairs
jungle of softness, ocean rising 
a blind dragon stumbles by a dead mangrove forest.

Again, the night drops saliva on my palm
I retreated to her field, a hermit crab
shell whistling to far-flung oceans, 
she pulled me onto the dragon’s back.

The poem belongs to my newest poetry collection, “Drowning Dragon Slips by Burning Plains” which can be pre-ordered here! Your support gives me so much courage to write every day.

You can also find the book at Bookshop.org, Texas Tech University Website, and Amazon.