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Lipstick Elegy
I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain
shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps
soundlessly in her bed. Her áodài of the whitest silk.
My mother knew her mother died before the telephone rang
like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving SàiGòn.
Arrow shot back to its bow. Long-distance missile.
She’d leap into the sky to fly home if she could. Instead she works
overtime. Curls her hair with hot rollers. Rouges her cheeks
like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. I’m her understudy. Hiding
in the doorway between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation
to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals, puckering my lips
as if to kiss a man that loves me the way I want to be loved.
I speak their bewitching names aloud. Twisted Rose. Fuchsia in Paris. Irreverence.
I choose the lipstick she’d least approve of. My mouth a pomegranate
split open. A grenade with a loose pin. In the kitchen,
I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance
for hours, mesmerized by my reflection in a charred skillet.
I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed
when she taught me to pray the ChúĐại Bi, when I braided her hair
in unbearable heat, my tiny fingers weaving the silver strands
into a fishtail, a French twist. Each knot a future she never named, buried
in the soil of her, where she locked away the image of her sons and daughters
locked away. I’m sorry, mother of my mother, immortal bodhisattva
with a thousand hands, chewing a fist of betel root, your teeth black as dawn.
No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.
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Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022). Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Man Ray, A l’Heure de l’Observatoire les Amoureux (Observatory Time: The Lovers), 1932–4.
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