Mai Der Vang is the 2016 Walt Whitman Award winner of the Academy of American Poets and author of Afterland (Graywolf, 2017). Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post and elsewhere. She is co-editor of How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011). She has received residencies from Hedgebrook and she is a Kundiman fellow.
In the penumbra of an oak under sculpted
Moonlight, we pile the last waking hours
On our faces, breathe the wilderness of dry
Heat waiting for fall ventilations. It feels
Hmong people say one’s spirit can run off,
Go into hiding underground.
Only the physical stays behind.
Chambers fall to splinter gravel.
Leaf grows from my throat.
Walls forsake the crumpled ground
It is meant to hold up.
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I press my hand to your sleep.
Then I find your spent head under small
whirling tresses
having digested the clatter
of car horns, children
bustling into sweet shops.
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