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 sailsAway from my breathing. They tell me I amNot made of mirrors but from a wolf that sleptIn a grave and gave birth to a sunrise. She isThe fruit that formed me, the dense coat of silkShadowing me out of the ice. Sometimes IDream in the voice of another empire, andI see its feet slink through the crosshairs,Clipping around shells and splinters of trappedFires. Its ballroom caves ripple out murmuringsOf the lost ones, despair mottling the dark asSmall searchlights. Lost Ones, who lingerThrough a solar rage, I know your pain livesCardinal. Love spills from your hallucinations.Once, a child whispered into me: such sorrowCan only be followed by a decade of snow.I crawled into the sky and wept a puddleOf 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 camouflageAll those who came to it learned the burden of hiding Long ago we memorizedthe refrains of wild birds stitched them underneath our evacuated skinsThen man Then soldier Then vividness of saffron and canary arriving as small showers divulging its anatomy to the ecosystemTo keep the covert buried is nothow this story bends The insects have always knownTheir lineage of pollen and the children of insects know tooMay this secret war its author of poisons its professor of counterfeit treatieskidnapper of honeybees each iotaof 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