"If I Say My Body is Grieving" by Susan Nguyen

If I Say My Body is Grieving

Is it American or Vietnamese?

My mother said: Our country no longer exists
My father said: In our language, the same word means green and blue: xanh

My father said: To distinguish between the two,
you say xanh lá: green leaf and xanh da trời: blue sky

My mother’s miscarriage-after-me said: What color was I?

My mother said: In our language, the same word means land and water: nước
My grandmother said: All of language is a metaphor         Say what you mean 

My father said: If I say I cannot live without nước do I mean country?

My mother said: Vietnam’s body curves like the letter S: serpentine, fragile

My father said: The Mekong Delta translates to River of Nine Dragons because nine tributaries sprawl towards the sea

My mother’s miscarriage-after-me said: Was my salted mouth American or Vietnamese?

My mother said: Don’t translate me
My grandmother said: Don’t speak lest your tongue rushes like a river

In the night, history absconds with us
We learn to open in darkness

My mother said: When you tell it, do I float on land and water?
My father said: Am I the green leaf                  the blue sky?

My American mouth cannot separate itself from my body

after Athena Farrokhzad's White Blight

ξ

"If I Say My Body is Grieving" first appeared in Nimrod.

Susan Nguyen is a poet based in Phoenix, Arizona. She received her MFA in poetry from Arizona State University. She is the recipient of the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Award in Creative Writing as well as awards from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, dialogue, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com.

---

Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"Immunity" by Mikko Harvey

Immunity

The ladybug that landed
on your nose once
in fourth grade
and sat there for a minute, right at the tip,
is okay. The tic you do
with your nostrils sometimes
(when you flare them when you’re nervous)
is okay. The fact that you skipped the party,
lied to your friends, and drank cup
after cup of tea alone in your bed
is okay. It’s okay
that you never responded to Gregory’s email.
Gregory is taking a shower right now.
You are nowhere near the mind of Gregory.
The evidence against you
is not damning. Even the little white
pills can be forgiven — they knew not
what they were doing.
But you, you know.
You get to watch your hands choose.
The ladybug thanks you for not crushing it;
the way this world gives thanks
is to fly away, into a tree
with thick foliage, out of sight,
where it dies and is born and dies and is born
on a continual loop —
what was the name of that song?
What was the name of that month
where you stopped loving yourself?
Temporarily?
What time is it? Has the boat left?
Yes,
the boat’s left.
The boat’s going on a long, slow
trip up the river.
Then it’s coming back.

ξ

“Immunity” first appeared in Salt Hill Journal.

Mikko Harvey is the author of Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). His poems appear in places such as Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He currently lives in Ithaca, New York, where he works as a writer for an immigration law firm

---

Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"My Snatch Is Pretty Good" by Alison Pelegrin

My Snatch Is Pretty Good

If you hear pussy when I say snatch, either
you belong to my cabal of weightlifting poet yogis,
or you’re my mother, snatch the frequent star
of her dirty jokes. As explanation all I have
is that her father was a Marine with a vodka IV
who told home health to blow it out of their asses.
Hip! – we called him Hip – when I think of him,
I think of suicide – I saw how his eyes roved for that pistol,
and in my fear imagined a froth of blood pinking his undershirt
the exact color of the tank top I now wear to the gym,
which claims, in girly script, My Snatch Is Pretty Good.
An understatement, and a double entendre if you know
that in addition to vajayjay, snatch also refers
to that olympic lift in which the barbell, with one pull,
travels from the ground to overhead. Because I’m giddy
with the miracle of speed and kilo math,
and my bouncing plates are so loud that other lifters
look my way--that’s why I giggle when I hit a snatch.
But also because of my mom, who reminds me, even now,
when I screw up, to check myself because I used to live
“in her snatch.” Considering our history,
I knew she would laugh at my tank top
and the bumper sticker version I bought for her
because I’m proud of all my women,
bad ass, indelicate broads, and me the same,
in a full squat bearing down with 60 kilos overhead,
the sweet spot where I find my balance.
I have felt a midwife’s intimacy with other lifters,
our tribe gathered around the platform
as though awaiting a birth, only it’s the barbell
we are waiting on, waiting for it to move,
willing with our minds, helping with yells if one
among us is buried under a squat, grinding to stand.
But it is the lifter who does all of the work,
as in birth it is the mother, alone and watched,
all eyes on her, on her snatch, vortex from which
daughters and sons emerge and unfold,
each of them a bloodied lotus, and the mother--
well, when it was me, I was stunned, amazed,
as with a personal best on the barbell. What the hell
just happened? How did I do this?
Is there no end to my strength?

ξ

“My Snatch Is Pretty Good” first appeared in Tin House. It will appear in Pelegrin’s next collection, Our Lady of Bewilderment, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2022.

Alison Pelegrin is the author of four poetry collections, including Our Lady of Bewilderment, which is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2022. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, she lives in south Louisiana, where for a few weeks each spring, wisteria rains purple on the lawn.

---

Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.

"A Stone" by Michael Bazzett

A Stone

wrote a book of poems,

seventy-odd pages
and each one empty.
It was called happy to wait,

and its cover was a turtle shell
scoured by weasels,
left abandoned on the beach.

Its sun-bleached husk
was blank as air.
It took years to read,

mostly because the smell
of sunlight and dust
that rose from its pages

was so distracting,
the way it conjured
mountains out of nothing,

the way it made us
drop what we were doing,
stare out the window

and forget who we were —

ξ

“A Stone” first appeared in The Threepenny Review. It will appear in Bazzett’s next collection, The Echo Chamber, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in fall 2021.

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Tin House, Copper Nickel, and The Threepenny Review. He is the author of four poetry collections – You Must Remember This, (winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry), Our Lands Are Not So Different (Horsethief 2017), The Interrogation, (Milkweed 2017), and The Temple (Bull City 2020) – as well as a recently published verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh (Milkweed). The recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.

---

Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.