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
“He was already old then” and part of U.S.A.I.D.
a poem in English dispensing VN kinship history
She says Saigon women are famous for their glamour
was at the beauty salon the day her restaurant
was bombed A package bomb and inside job
courtesy of the young dishwasher who earlier
that week met with new friends she never saw
before They came to the restaurant She bought
them a round of Cokes The explosion killed
the cook’s three year old daughter and closed
the restaurant for good Things remembered
directly after “The Fall”: Surprise embarrassment
mewling kittens brought to third grade show-and-tell
in a paper grocery bag Reluctant beehive up-dos
Beef on a stick jumbo shrimp Sterno flames
Named any number of names
“In the future even stones will need each other”
Copyright © 2021 by Hoa Nguyen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 10, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Made up of oral history, memory, ghosts, and documents from family archives, this poem reflects a diasporic experience of a mixed-race Vietnamese child of the 1970s and 80s. The final line is borrowed from singer/songwriter Trịnh Công Sơn and acts as a spectral form of divination.”
—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.