Vietnamese Artists Collective [p.3]

In the aftermath of the U.S. war in Viet Nam and the displacement of Vietnamese people all over the world, rebuilding community was essential for survival. The Vietnamese Artists Collective continues in that tradition, building a community based on art, for where there is art, there is hope. And for a war-torn people, that can mean everything.

by Anh-Hoa Thi. Nguyen

Intervals
For Trinh T. Minh-Ha

We make love in the openings of the afternoon. Monarchs fucking in flightlight flickering on our faces-reflecting sounds and sounds and sounds. I die with the day. Each day. The moon multiplies and eclipses like eyes moving through the silence of our bodies. Time comes and comes, then leaves. He is time. The passing of time.

Each day I close my eyes and open them. In time. In time the darkness will come and he will leave with the light. He will leave and enter again, enter into the doorway of a speechless afternoon. My doorway. My time. My time will come. Will come in intervals of flight, a reel of wings rising and falling, the rhythm of love. Eclipsing bodies.

We make love in passing. In the afternoon. In silence. Sounds multiply and die. The day reflects time and opens his door, shedding light on his face. I see his eyes through the sun. Through the flickering of the moon. Through the fucking. Through the coming. Through the leaving. Through the time. The intervals of time. Each day.

A Buddhist Heart
Each time I burned my body for you, my heart remained intact-a lotus perfumed in gasoline sacrificed at your feet. I watched the saffron flames engulf me, watched them sear away my skin, crimson flesh of a plum stripped of its peel. Tender and glowing like Mars,
I would rise to the sky for you to see me. In those moments I was your torch and we were united. United by the gaze, the scent, the heat, the shutter. For love of another, I'd whisper
to myself, faithful in muted pain. My hope, my heart, extinguishing as you stand there, paralyzed, each time, like a still camera unable to look away.

100° C
There is no
going back,
you and I,
like broth
clouded by
the blood

The Never-Ending Dream
It will be a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger stands still the elephant will crush him, but the tiger will never stand still. He will leap upon the elephant's back, ripping out huge chunks of flesh and then he will disappear again into the jungle and slowly the elephant will bleed to death.-Ho Chi Minh, 1946

My hands are tied, palm leaves spiral above my head. The rain, the endless rain between my eyes-I have not eaten for days, have not slept, the bags of sand stacked like barricades-they are everywhere and nowhere-cannonballs hailing-les fantomes tombent du ciel-a sickly sweet smell permeates the valley and strangles me. I can hear them digging-can see them circling red-can see them marching forward like ants, can feel their shadows crawling up my skin.

Suddenly-silence falls like the last drop of morphine on my tongue. No more metal scraping earth. No more metal. No more.
No-When I wake, a concrete tomb lies buried in my chest-all around me a wall of corpses, still shivering with bursts of fire.

Mother Shell For thousands of miles
we were melded, like shards
of metal in a wound

Still healing-her arms
a vessel of safety harbored
an infant's hunger

In silence, we were
together a country,
a body of refuge

---

Ky-Phong Tran is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and member of the Vietnamese Artists Collective. He is getting his MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. Kyø Phong received a New America Media award in 2005. Visit his website at www.frequent wind.com