• Forthcoming in Vestiges_03: Mimesis

    THE MOTHER, 1985

    The eloquent lungs of us twins are piled

    upon one another. Mother, your

    concealed nipples are the tents that the

    feet of our existence step on.

     

    I hope our breathing doesn’t temporarily

    upset your evening inside the tumescent

    hide. This oblivion. This sublime maternal

    gesture. Coming from you.

     

    Mother, are you warm beneath the animal

    hide? Does it nurture your lungs and keep

    them from the cold and sunlight?

     

    The cane lies next to you like a stiff

    husband. He is not our father, is he? Do

    not forget, Mother, the recurring motif of

    our neonatal breath blowing on the

    crippled twilight of your neck.

     

    The father of civilization hasn’t bothered

    to clothe us. The earth lives without

    statues, figurines, pantheons, and archaic

    stones.

     

    Mother, isn’t the night breathless? We

    love being snowed into your embrace. We

    love the amphitheater of your chest. Our

    heads are diminutive gladiators vying for

    your tenderness and beastly lullaby.

     

    The gods do not distinguish nature from

    nature, biology from science, and you

    haven’t distinguished my brother from

    me. You hold us with fastened ardor.

     

    We know that farther below us the hide is

    pregnant with your feet and something

    else we do not have a name for.

     

    Sometimes, in the darkest hours of our

    breaths, I was led to believe that it was

    our father’s bloated dead body. When we

    do not know what it is, our imagination

    runs wild.

     

    It’s lovely to lie on top of my brother’s

    young, soft flesh. I hope I am not

    crushing his fragile lungs and bones. But I

    trust you know the scales of our existence

    and I trust that you know how to balance

    our breaths and draw the symmetries of

    my brother’s body and my body to meet

    the shoreline of yours.

     

    Is this how things will be forever? My

    brother’s skin is so soft. Sometimes I

    forget that I am not a morning glory

    pressed against another morning glory.

    It’s just that my skin and his skin are such

    amicable neighbors.

     

    I cannot see, with your back turned away

    from the dusk, if it’s morning-to-be or

    night. It doesn’t matter, really, the passage

    of time.



    DAWN, 1990

    They made us pull our pants down,

    stretch our legs and feet, and lift up our

    chins.

     

    Five clouds wiggle like white caterpillars

    that have been recently promoted to

    angels.

     

    We saw one leaf dying in the strong rain,

    battered by the wind, and we didn’t stop

    to eat it. We let it live.

     

    We are famous for our ability to fuck on a

    string. Sexual funambulists, they call us.

    The women usually fall off when we try

    to fuck them. But we let them fall anyway.

     

    How could we save them if they don’t

    have legs that move like a swinging

    trapeze.

     

    Note: These poems are ekphrastic studies of the figurative paintings of Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, from the time period of 1983–2005.

     

    Vi Khi Nao was born in Long Khánh, Vietnam. She is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry.

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