War thick like jelly on breakfast bread
            & we finish breathing a new summer
stilting in rice paddy June. Our temple
            cries an elegy lodged in the throat
of mercy. Mama paws me to the empty lantern
            light; teaches me the throat is a pipe
organ: tubing calcified with teething tragedy.
            In what life is a nine-year-old girl
abandoned to soldiers, we ask. I tell my children
            the story of a scar like an old folk tale: look,
the land lacquered with entire histories of violence
            is dyed the color of your mother’s ao dai,
indigo for immortality, indigo for i’m still alive.
            In mourning, the america they pledge
allegiance to is the same america that loves the smell
            of napalm in the morning, a mouthful of ash
sweetened by agent orange. Vietnam is the dust
            in my bones burying & baying for the burn.
It’s a common belief: how Cao Dai uncorked
            my body to a diaspora, unpeeling persimmon
skin from the flesh that domesticated disaster
            like a name. In my next life, the picture
is my prison: a reminder of earth plumped
            with watered grief & new God blooming
from the belly of Bible; a thousand words
            to say a daughter thirsting for home.

—Serrina Zou

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