Olivia Do
In Which I Almost Say It
Susan Nguyen
threading a needle through my violet
desires. But it’s the glow of cow parsnip
that I’m drawn to, their cauliflower heads
towering by the sides of the roads,
wandering onto front lawns uninvited.
By all accounts, a weed. I’m enamored
even before knowing their toxic sap
will blister and burn: a fence sign proclaims
NO TOUCH. But I want to take my chances,
to cup my hand over their soft heads,
make it rain white blooms. To know I’m
dangerous too. Last month when we crested
the hill in search of frogs, the pond bloated
with storm, the spring peepers’ incessant chirps
flooded our mouths. I tell you the story
that drifted through childhood of the girl
and the frog on her twilit driveway. She
watched its throat inflate, like bubblegum,
her own body vibrating a delicate chorus
until, finally, she approached small and soft
with a brandished stick. Her palm a curved
hum as she pierced the frog’s song-throat—
We can be cruel, you say. But show me
someone who knows what to make of want.
Easier, sometimes, to make a wreck. The longer
we lingered into June, the more the bullfrogs
swelled, our quiet punctuating their deep-throated
calls. I didn’t know where the danger lie:
in touching you or not touching. Our want
was a long and low bellow. We waited
for it to slip from our lungs.
Confession
almost losing my ticket to the adamant wind, the ocean’s brine darting
up to sting us, us drifting in, out of easy conversation. You tell me
your girlfriend asked you not to see me and I’m thrilled you didn’t listen.
To not bring up the past, the lies I found out to be true. Or how you made me
feel crazy all the damn time—never again. To move through life with a microscopic
intensity, submerged in each blown-up second: every lover and almost-lover,
the sun’s heat on my shoulders. Roadkill. It leaves me gutted.
On land we wave goodbye to the gulls. Weave through the markets and lose
sight of each other. I catch glimpses of your shirt, remember the time
I rounded the trail and you’d dropped your pants, exposed yourself to nature
because why not. The fish gleam immaculate on ice and I still love everyone
I’ve ever loved. I come up for air and forget what I’m forgiving.
I walk the other way when I see them.
Susan Nguyen is the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her poem “Impossible Deer” won the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She is the editor in chief of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a member of the She Who Has No Master(s) collective.
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