“Speaker,” by Paul Tran

Can’t you see her at her stopIn her gingham skirt, thinning? Inside, her groan growsLouder, growling. False

Spring nibbling her ankles stings like a slapAs she asks for her Social Security

Check, her needle entering herThimble and thumb. Her bus comes and goes while she daydreamsPressing her left wrist to her iron

Until her arteries become artillery. Her bus was a boatShe didn’t take to her toothless mothers

Calling for her, asleep on banana leavesAlive with ants. QuiveringAs if under a monsoon with a secret tearing in half

Her baby sister’s chronically beautiful smile, a country cut acrossThe seventeenth parallel, she’s a woman after

Trading her name for her future.Nobody’s daughter. Nobody’s mother. Nobody’s bride.She unwraps her

Cheese sandwich, a moon moth splaying its iridescent wings.Hunger has her. In the ancient world and the new

Hope’s the same for moth and monarch: hazyInstrument of flight armies gnaw and gnash, leaving the deadUncovered like a girl ablaze

A century ago, crying for help, coveting just a drop of water.Hope has no feathers. Hope is nothing

Nobody has known. She takesAnother bite, tastesSkull grains, majesty purpled on her tongue. Covert daffodil in the shade

Beginning her inevitable ascent with less than an ideaAmong the tamed irises, she savors her Kraft

Between her WonderBread. Like hope, wonder is doubt is faith isA woman exiled, feeling her way from paradise to an arid wilderness

Stolen in pursuit of ahistorical happiness, amnesiac.Self-evident and undeniable, she’d return to that stubborn girl

Stumbling from the villageOuthouse, her scarf tied tight around herHead shorn bright as a pig knuckle, if she could. She can’t

Contain her, filling a void by avoiding.Despite her trade and livelihood, she has no appetite anymore

For adoration or adornment. I will take everything from you,Her Life says. My humiliation, too?She asks. You are stupid, ugly, and you have no friends,

Life says. Who?She asks. Her bus comes. She opensHer Vietnamese-to-English dictionary. You will lose,

Says the speaker. I like you,She replies, or I, like you?

Between her and the clearest sky, cold rain’s fallingThrough light too bright to see. Her bus goes. Everything goes, breaks—Including her water. Who knows

Who’s Nobody now. She laughs, laughs loud, a sirenAnnouncing invasion

Early on the first morning of a year millions won’t survive.Tell me who brought down whom.