Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

Haunted Sonnet

Hoa Nguyen

Haunt lonely and find when you lose your shadow
secretive house centipede on the old window

You pronounce Erinys as “Air-n-ease”
Alecto: the angry Magaera: the grudging

Tisiphone: the avenger (voice of revenge)
“Women guardians of the natural order”

Think of the morning dream with ghosts
Why draw the widow’s card and wear the gorgeous

Queen of Swords crown Your job is
to rescue the not-dead woman before she enters

the incinerating garbage shoot wrangle silver
raccoon power Forever a fought doll

She said, “What do you know about Vietnam?”
Violet energy ingots Tenuous knowing moment

Hoa Nguyen was born in the Mekong Delta near Saigon, Vietnam. When she was eighteen months old, she moved to the United States and was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. Nguyen earned her MFA at the New College of California in San Francisco, where she studied with Tom Clark and Lyn Hejinian, and remained active in the Bay Area poetry scene for years before moving in 1997 to Austin, Texas, where she lived for fourteen years.

About Hoa Nguyen

Occasion

Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month

Themes

Audio

Form

Sonnet

About this Poem

“‘Haunted Sonnet’ is a sonnet among many sonnets that I tend to write (little songs). It is informed by dream and Greek myth and investigates the notion of haunts and of being haunted, a fury that feels primordial, archetypal feminine power aspects, and the rupture and loss of diaspora.”
—Hoa Nguyen

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

The Pu Pu Platter Appetizer

Treat food in the urban suburb Chinese
sticky ribs fried triangles For fifty years

she kept the poem written out on Holiday Inn
note paper A poem by a man named Dolf Droge

archived at the Library of Congress as “Vietnam Historian”
She heard him read the poem in mid 1960s Vietnam

Hoa Nguyen

2021

Ficus Carica Sonnet

Cinched belt tugged tight around the heart
5 or 6 aerial roots dangling      A strangler fig

Do homeless ancestors live inside the tree?
Child of noise    Hold the loosened ends    You

may miss the moon or fall in love with it         Embrace
ashes    I too am far removed    A thirst that wanders

thirsting     And I could never ask the name of the boy
who died     A baby boy who died but what could you do

and maybe words hang in sinew and care     Writer
of dead words or living words and life's hammer

Encase the host tree and erase it     I don't know
the folk songs on farms far fro

Hoa Nguyen

2018

Autumn Poem 2012

Call capable
      a lemony
light & fragile

Time like a ball and elastic

so I can stop burning the pots

        wondering yes       electric stove

She is her   but I don't reme
mber                         remember
the ashes I obsess    She said

I was obsessed with
(not wanting to work with
ashes)

     Mandible dream
    says the street
& ash work

              because the scorn
and ions long
there   I wor   I woke up
in the overlooked dark

Hoa Nguyen

2013

Poems

Page submenu block

Haunted Sonnet

More by this poet

The Pu Pu Platter Appetizer

Ficus Carica Sonnet

Autumn Poem 2012

Newsletter Sign Up