Watching Platoon with Your Uncle, the Refugee

You used to think of yourself
as fluent, your tongue an old general.
Four stars—a good Buddhist from Saigon,
a committed teetotaler. You picture him
in New Jersey now, where your uncle might
have lived, so far from the action
and noise of little wars. Supply trucks idling
outside the pharmacy. Hueys flocking overhead.
Midnight rain’s pitter-patter-boom,
counting hours between the stale thunder
of rocket strikes. For your tongue, the din of history
is a ghost, a hungry one, and so he keeps
bees, allows them to fill his days and
nights with their droning, to bury their bodies
in his body. A funeral of hatchets
hatched to dull the arthritis. Your tongue, he does
what he can. Which is to say, he cannot help
you interpret the villagers onscreen,
their own tongues too sharp and frantic
and loud, thrumming in triple-time
like suppressing fire. Which is to say,
each syllable that escapes the
parched chambers of their mouths
escapes you too—a hollow-point
leaving no exit wound, no doorstep
for the dead to darken. Read their lips.
Reread them. The villagers want something,
this much you know. They might even want
what you want, which is for something to focus you
the way danger focuses a platoon
of bees into a cruise missile, chasing the world’s
throat as it rotates in real time.

---

Steven Duong (@bonelesskoi) is an American poet and a son of Vietnamese immigrants. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, he has poems featured or forthcoming in publications such as Passages North, Salt Hill, Pleiades, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poets.org, and Tupelo Quarterly. He is currently living in Shanghai as a 2019 Thomas J. Watson fellow, conducting a yearlong traveling writing project titled “Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment,” which he documents on stevenduongwrites.com.