Haunted Sonnet
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
Copyright © 2015 by Hoa Nguyen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘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
Hoa Nguyen
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.