Hieu Minh Nguyen

Even though it’s May & the ice cream truck parked outside my apartment is somehow certain, I have a hard time believing winter is somehow, all of a sudden, over —the worst one of my life, the woman at the bank tells me. Though I’d like to be, it’s impossible to be prepared for everything. Even the mundane hum of my phone catches me off guard today. Every voice that says my name is a voice I don’t think I could possibly leave (it’s unfair to not ask for the things you need) even though I think about it often, even though leaving is a train headed somewhere I’d probably hate. Crossing Lyndale to meet a friend for coffee I have to maneuver around a hearse that pulled too far into the crosswalk. It’s empty. Perhaps spring is here. Perhaps it will all be worth it. Even though I knew even then it was worth it, staying, I mean. Even now, there is someone, somehow, waiting for me.

Once, a man named a thing beautiful& so we wore it, buried it, turned it into currency. Somewhere, maybe here, maybe now, I stand completely still until he looks in my direction. Sometimes I don’t believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful. Sometimes any warm thing will do. Sometimes it’s me, a warm thing in the low light.Beautiful is what the man called me after he did what he wanted with — I’m running out of ways to describe it — my body, my silence. Beautiful. Why, I ask, in order to love yourself must you, first, be loved? A bone sucked clean of its marrow. A trail of ants magnified into ash. & of course, I’m asking no one. & of course, I know the answer. Of course, I know it’s not me they’re looking for, the men, I mean. & I wished he didn’t feel the need to speak, really wished — like me — he just kept quiet, but no, he had to speak, he had to say beautiful— & now, goddamnit, my body appears, trapped in the long tunnel of a telescope. & now I am here attending the aftermath of my own ruin, with nothing but beautiful to keep me company. Maybe he meant the city beyond the window. Maybe he was talking to himself. Maybe beautiful, as in good job, as in look what I just did with my own two hands.

In a movie I have never seen: a small-town drunk stumbles into a beam of light & wakes up convinced he was abducted by aliens, convinced a hole opened in the sky & swallowed him — said they did something strange to his body some kind of experiment, said a hole opened, said cold light cauterized him shut, redefined that red theory, chrome instrument turned him into a skinless puzzle, a scrambled egg sealed back into its shell. Madness, too, can be accumulative. When my blood seemed uncontrollable, ran messy with pulp down their fingers, my cousins finally left the room, laughing closing the basement door behind them.

Past the congested interstate, past the long lines outside the Dorothy Day Center, past the cheering bleachers, the steam rising from the coach’s face, the fathers straining in prayer, past the rusting letters on the marquee, the dim lights along Main, the couples who will fuck during the movie & the couples who won’t, past the frozen orchard, past the defaced statue of a saint, a dog chews thin the leather cord around his neck. The opposite of hunger is not satisfaction, it is birth. It is what makes a man chisel a face into stone. It is what drives the body to lie in the fresh snow. It is what quiets the world when she pulls you in close. It is the winning pass, the crowd too busy counting down to notice. The world puts its mouth on you & you don’t say a thing. The world digs a hole in your yard & it’s up to you to fill it, up to you to find something useful to do with your sadness. Strange, the yellow beetle, dried between the pages of the dictionary, staining the page with its flattened body — its outline, a dirty halo circling the word pleased— please, you’ve circled the same two blocks in search of a place to park, circled the yard howling a name that won’t respond, but you still think you know enough to call that enough? The boat smacks against the dock it’s tied to. Your mother fixes your father’s tie before closing the casket. Everyone you loved refused to die in this town before they died in this town. The woman beside you on the plane wants to know where you’re going.

I was probably worst at selling weed — robbed weekly, used too much of my own product, cut each bag with a dash of oregano — but then I have to consider that summer Matty asked me to help him boost cars, his dad called me a liability — too paranoid to be lookout, too shaky to use the slim jim, didn’t even know how to drive stick — oh yeah, & let’s not forget that time Mo almost lost an arm after I convinced him to pay me twenty bucks to stitch his wound with fishing line instead of going to the hospital, or that time I convinced Aliyah to let me tattoo a cross on her ankle with a safety pin & a ballpoint — & then there’s that time I swiped a Stentor from Carl Magee’s locker & tried to set myself straight by becoming a violinist, but of course, the noise complaints, the neighbors banging the portraits off the walls, the boys talking shit, calling me prodigy,fancy chink— & I wonder if they’re still having a good laugh, like when they found out I wanted to be a poet & so they glued roses & violets to the hood of my Kia, & so maybe I wanted, for the first time, to prove them wrong, prove I didn’t belong there, & so maybe I made new friends — friends who wrote poems, who sat around talking about poems, who went to school to study poems and lived in off-campus apartments where I crashed on nights I got too fucked up on white boy drugs to drive back to the Eastside, where, even without me, the rosin glow of junkers trace the block, where Mandy, three years sober, tucks the kids into bed, where Lee, first in his class, spray-paints the fleet of stolen bikes gold, where Andrew stands in the kitchen reading the Bible in the dim light from the microwave, where Nikki, years later, coming home after a double at Champps, calls to wish me a happy birthday, & I am, of course, too busy to answer — somewhere in a different time zone, at a swanky party celebrating a man I do not know, who just won an award for a book I have not read & the woman who smells of citrus, who’s been raving to me all night about how much she admires my work, excuses herself to use the bathroom, leaving, in the seat beside me, her open purse.

Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful. I should say something nice about the weather. I should be in awe of the living, but the world dulls when I step into it. The squirrels scatter, the branches lift. Sure, I’ve hurt the ones I’ve loved by not paying attention.Not alone — never alone is a lesson I need to understand. It was you who said that. It’s you still. You who says,Look! You who points to the sky. You who tilts my chin toward the heron, who cups the minnow in your hands, who spots the deer miles ahead, who dulls the world with your absence. You who says,Look! & when I look, you are gone, replaced by the whitetail’s hind legs, fading into the bush.

Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice she used to say no woman could love you& I watch her pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast. My disappointing shape. She asks for a bowl of plain broth & it becomes the cup of vinegar she would pour down my throat. Everyday after school, I would kneel before her. I would remove my clothes & ask her to mark the progress. It’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful for her. In my dreams I am thin & if not thin, something better. I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs. The room fills with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.