Cut #1 (Kitchen at Noon)
The blade, huge,
on which my daily
panic of a face
glimmers in a blur,
drives its sharp tongue clean
through the ripe, sweet cheek
of an early June mango.
Cut #5 (Winds)
One, two, three, then twenty,
and twenty more, perhaps fifty in total,
fifty pages of poetry
are all of a sudden lifted
by the plateau’s late afternoon wind,
carried away from the four small
hands of the two female poets
boating on the jade green
river by the Perfume Waterfall.
Some poems fly
down to the scented water, some waft
up the swaying pines.
Author/Translator Bio
Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer, curator, and translator born in Vietnam.
Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Margins, Jacket2, and various anthologies. She is the author of Masked Force (Sàn Art), the pamphlet-catalog to the exhibition of Võ An Khánh’s wartime photographs that she curated in 2020. Nguyễn-Hoàng holds a B.A. from Stanford University.
