Jacqueline Pham is a first year student in the MFA Creative Writing program at California State University, Long Beach. She holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees from CSULB, one in Literature and one in Creative Writing with a minor in Psychology. Her poems have been published in RipRap, The Mas Tequila Review, Subliminal Interiors, and the Anthology of International Youth Poetry . Currently, her favorite poets are Frank O’Hara, Allison Benis White, Ron Padgett, and Sylvia Plath.

Four Poems (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

Neurotica

Neurotica is the art
of perfecting control.
It's the gut-aching desire
to witness the old moon
surrendering itself
to the arms of a new one --
in a precise pocket of time
at the speed of which a dandelion
burns, much faster than stars
smoldering away the miles.

Neurotica is the hunger
for saturated beauty
within extinction.
It's the brief interlude
right before
fissuring the wings
of a diaphanous emerald dragonfly,
such a nebulous addiction
like the constant peddling scheme --
of getting dirty to make clean.

Je suis Désolé (or I'm Sorry)

The salty intimacy of childhood
serves warm spoonfuls of loneliness
and I'm still haunted by the longing
to know who I'll become
after all this is over.
Now, only broken chairs,
putrid ropes and rusty Santoku knives sing
of failure. I stare into the sour emptiness
of my mother's soul. She tells me,
"It is too late to die young."
But she forgets that I was born
wearing her traditional áo dài*
and I'll come back from the dead
with it on.

* áo dài - a traditional tailored Vietnamese long tunic with side slits over wide trousers

I was going to kill my heroine

but I changed my mind- you cannot find peace by avoiding life. Everyone must wrestle

alone in the dark- this is what we do. This is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

He’s a business man of some sort, a failed novelist, lacking voice, now only writes obituaries for the town’s newspaper. He met her on the freezing beach in Montauk, many many Februaries ago, when she asked him for the last piece of bread, then ate it right out of his hand before he could even answer- an act so intimate as if they were already lovers.

And years after they married, she still likes to buy her own flowers- to throw her own parties (a mask of confidence), but he knows: she’s always throwing parties to cover up the silence. To this day, she harbors the same thought as she did while growing up: the thought that if she allowed the silence to persist for too long, somehow she would disappear.

Now, she hates it when he gives her that look. A look that says hosting parties is so trivial- that she is trivial. Yet in her triviality, he’s addicted to her pain. She is lovable, thus, completely un-leave-able, he finds comfort in her misery- such comfort that it causes him to stray away from her truth: the fact that she wrestles alone in the dark, living, living only to satisfy, only to satisfy him.

What can you do when you're no longer the Hero of your own story?

Dew-kissed empty streets
pave lonely avenues in my mind.
The misty benches
on these streets
are my lullaby.
The streets are filled with a strong scent of burning leaves,
clouding my sight: escorting childhood memories
of lighting jasmine-wood-incense
at the temple with my Nana to my cerebrum.
After praying, I remember
wandering alone in the temple's garden,
chasing the silky music of waterfall
beneath Buddha's feet. It sounded as sweet as my first kiss
on the snow in Little Rock, Arkansas,
stolen by Monique Jimenez. Back in 1999,
all I ever wanted was to steal her heart first.
But back in 1999, all I ever wanted
was everything.

They told me that the Lotus flower
grew in muddy waters
but I've poured gallons of water
on the schoolyard playground
and I've never seen a hint of Lotus.
My friends laughed at me for crying
over whatchumacallit because they were kids
and they were white (and my mother told me
that white kids don't know about lotus flowers).

"Ain't nuthin' ya can do
when ya find out
you ain't no longa zee hero
in ya own story man."

The deflated balloons of my hopes and dreams
caressed the asphalt,
and then ran over by truck drivers.
I was as excited as Eeyore to grow up
and embrace the world. After turning 23,
I finally left the nest and moved
to the octopus's garden
underneath the stormy waves.

Jaxberry lost her sanity
and one day, she will join Virginia Woolf
on the backside of water, cultivating oyster shells.
"Cá không ăn muối cá ươn,
con cãi cha mẹ trăm đường con hư."
Now, just empty streets rocking me to sleep,
just blankets of fog holding my hand,
leading me home.