Read the introduction, "The Horse Is Always Running" by Monica Sok.
Vigil For the Missing
On my most nocturnal days, the icebergsStop listening to me. They shift their sails
Away from my breathing. They tell me I amNot made of mirrors but from a wolf that slept
In a grave and gave birth to a sunrise. She isThe fruit that formed me, the dense coat of silk
Shadowing me out of the ice. Sometimes IDream 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 murmuringsOf the lost ones, despair mottling the dark as
Small searchlights. Lost Ones, who lingerThrough 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, untilGrandmother called: come in from the winter.
Declassified
May the dead be ever-evidenced
May their clandestine namesbellow 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 memorizedthe 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 nothow 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 treatieskidnapper 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
