Third Country Resettlement
“From its inception / writing was always a preparation. / For loss.” —Dao Strom
then find your one last
live self hiding
shelter its body in your palm
hold it closer than a passport
carry it dearer than permission
next draw a line
beyond rubble river or hills beyond even
night then cross it (your horizon)
whisper run til you fly
this is how we will belong
to a place an idea if we can
only after will there be time
to call / recall ones left / lost
& l e t t h e i r n a m e s w i l d m a r c h a c r o s s y o u r t o n g u e
if there is such a when
that is where we shall live
Airport
Light falls upon the path before us, a gray-white lattice. In my mind, the scene rattles as in movies just before the spaceship lands. A man shields his eyes with an arm and a woman aims her pupilless orbs. In reality, your eyes shut. You refuse to see beyond our feet. You gather our bags from tarmac. One with a broken handle, you tuck into the crook of your left arm and press against your side. You hook the other over your right shoulder and, tilting against the weight, take my hand. We walk lop-sided towards the airplane, me a half-step behind. I am little. So little I do not recognize myself. The mother inside me draws a curtain to guard us from the light.
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Some people claim to lose time in situations such as this. I think it is only that we cannot drink time, so it evaporates. It is said the brain declines the senses. Sight and sound, taste and smell, all become spirits and fly. The brain is busy pumping the machine, airing the heart. The brain is too busy to herd wayward neurons. I imagine my brain cells as children at a party, wild, unwieldy. Marbles, clattering noisily away. An open jar of sauce flung across the counter, impossible to re-collect. Moments count themselves like rosary and seem to disappear. Which were real? Which only metaphor? Years later, I find a bead, lint-covered, in the corner of a pocket. I stare, then pop it in my mouth and swallow.
Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar based in California’s Central Valley. Her poetry is forthcoming or published in Copper Nickel, The Minnesota Review, Wildness, They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Writers, and elsewhere. Essays appear in Amerasia, Verge, The Account, and other journals and edited volumes. She is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). In 2025, she is a Tin House Scholar and Susanna Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center.
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