Read the introduction, “The Horse Is Always Running” by Monica Sok.
Vigil For the Missing
On my most nocturnal days, the icebergs
Stop listening to me. They shift their sails
Away from my breathing. They tell me I am
Not made of mirrors but from a wolf that slept
In a grave and gave birth to a sunrise. She is
The fruit that formed me, the dense coat of silk
Shadowing me out of the ice. Sometimes I
Dream in the voice of another empire, and
I see its feet slink through the crosshairs,
Clipping around shells and splinters of trapped
Fires. Its ballroom caves ripple out murmurings
Of the lost ones, despair mottling the dark as
Small searchlights. Lost Ones, who linger
Through a solar rage, I know your pain lives
Cardinal. Love spills from your hallucinations.
Once, a child whispered into me: such sorrow
Can only be followed by a decade of snow.
I crawled into the sky and wept a puddle
Of sweet laurel until I bled at the ankles, until
Grandmother called: come in from the winter.
Declassified
May the dead be ever-evidenced
May their clandestine names
bellow from the mouth of an August
monsoon may they coax the truth
from every storm
Long ago
there lived a jungle
whose only cloth was camouflage
All those who came to it
learned the burden of hiding
Long ago we memorized
the refrains of wild birds
stitched them underneath
our evacuated skins
Then man Then soldier Then vividness
of saffron and canary
arriving as small showers
divulging its anatomy
to the ecosystem
To keep the covert buried is not
how this story bends
The insects have always known
Their lineage of pollen and the children
of insects know too
May this secret war its author of poisons
its professor of counterfeit treaties
kidnapper of honeybees each iota
of its polluted doing
may it all burn and blister
under its own nakedness
Mai Der Vang’s book Afterland received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and her poems have appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Learn more at Maidervang.com