“À ơi,” the sweet voice of gentle Mother
Her lullaby warms even the mountains and rivers
Mother’s love is beautiful and pure
With fragrant hands, she opens thousands of history pages
O Mother, O Mother Vietnam
Your love’s in a thousand melodies of lullabies
You teach your children to be just and compassionate,
to remember their roots and heroic ancestry.
Vietnam’s like a sad river branch with many twists and turns;
The moon dimmed, the water murky, the poor people, the bloodsheds…
Now, Mother’s voice is low, deep and sad
The two abysmal dark regions, a single source of suffering
Gentle Mother with shining virtue like a mirror
Her Flower of Compassion grows in her children’s garden
Mother sings a wonderful lullaby
Mother sings a lullaby of Love of Flowers and People…

Translated by Vương Thanh

Lời ru Mẹ Việt Nam

À ơi! Lời ngọt Mẹ hiền,
Tiếng ru ấm cả ba miền núi non
Mẹ tươi lòng ngát như son
Tay thơm Mẹ mở ngàn trang sử vàng.
Mẹ ơi, Mẹ hiền ơi. Ơi Mẹ Việt Nam
Tình thiêng muôn sợi tơ (ơ) đàn Mẹ rung
Dạy con nghĩa núi, tình sông
Dạy con nhớ gốc, khơi dòng liệt oanh
Nhánh sông sầu mấy khúc quanh
Trăng mờ, nước tủi, dân lành máu tuôn
Giờ đây tiếng Mẹ trầm buồn
Hai miền u tối, một nguồn đau thương
Mẹ hiền đức sáng như gương
Hoa Nhân Ái nở trong vườn con tươi
Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru tiếng hát tuyệt vời
Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru, Mẹ ru tiếng hát Lòng Đời Ươm Hoa…

Tuệ Nga

Kudos to all the leaders and parents for making the camping trip fun, engaging, and valuable for all of us. I also appreciate the feedback to help improve our next trip and reduce wasted food.

As I said briefly in our meeting, all the adults should step up to take the leftovers home. I wouldn’t mind taking home the extra eggs, but I wouldn’t be able to turn them into delicious flan like Chị Trâm Anh did. In fact, I have been eating bún all week.

As for the leaders, please don’t take it too hard on yourselves. I definitely appreciate transparency, but oversharing can be overwhelming. With all the emails flooding my inbox, I have trouble keeping up with all the information. I am absolutely fine with not getting emails that don’t involve me.

We are grateful for your dedication and contribution to our Cub. It’s a labor of love and I can’t do what you do. So please keep up the great work, my leaders!

“I ain’t a killer, but don’t push me. / Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to getting pussy.” These two lines from 2pac sums up The Glory. The 16-episode Korean drama is dark, suspenseful, and a bit too long. The plot is also a bit complex. I enjoyed bingeing it, but didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

The map of me can’t be all hills & mountains even though i’ve been country all my life. The twang in my voice has moved downhill to the flatland a time or two. My taste buds have exiled themselves from fried green tomatoes & rhubarb for goat milk & pine nuts. Still i return to old ground time & again, a homing blackbird destined to return. I am plain brown bag, oak & twig, mud pies & gut-wrenching gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. When my spine crooks even further toward my mother, i will continue to crave the bulbous tang of wild shallots, the familiar game of oxtails & kraut boiling in a cast iron pot. I toe-dive in all the rivers seeking the whole of me, scout virtual african terrain sifting through ancestral memories, but still i’m called back home through hymns sung by stout black women in large hats & flowered dresses. You have to risk the briar bush to reach the sweet dark fruit & ain’t no country woman all church & piney woods. There is pluck & cayenne pepper. There is juke joint gyrations in the youngun-bearing girth of this belly & these supple hips. All roads lead me back across the waters of blood & breast milk, from ocean to river, to the lake, to the creek, to branch & stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the glass i drink when i thirst to know where i belong.

Crystal Wilkinson

I haven’t skated on ice in a while. I want to go back to relearn the basics. Instead of following the Ice Sports Industry (ISI) curriculum, I want to create my own roadmap. This is what I came up with:

Backwards

• Backward crossovers (right-foot over left & left-foot over right)

Mohawks

• Forward inside & outside
• Backward outside & inside

3-Turns

• Forward outside & inside
• Backward outside & inside

Edges

• Forward outside & inside
• Backward outside & inside

Arabesques

• Forward outside & inside
• Backward outside & inside

Jumps

• Half flip
• Waltz (left over right backward crossover and switch arms)
• Ballet
• Half lutz
• Salchow (left over right backward crossover and switch arms)
• Toe loop (right inside 3-turn)

Advanced Jumps

• Flip jump
• Loop jump

Our sorrow and our love move into a foreign language.
–C.P. Cavafy (tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

English is dead   even though you still say English
Words even though you still   put them in English order
Your English is dead   yet it tugs away from you
Like a strong dog fighting a leash   the harder

It fights the   greater is your fear
It won’t if it gets free   return En-
glish fights you like a language   you’re
Taking in school   knowing you’ll never see the country

In the spring the trees outside the window are
Alive with life in the fall alive
With death   all year the teacher’s voice slips past you
A distant ambulance in a strange city

English is dead   the one Great Dane you’ve ev-
er seen in real life howls in the street   still but its howl is
Noise to you now now   you don’t recognize
The feeling in its cry   its foreign vowels

Shane McCrae

A fierce, fearlessness collection about body, shame, and violence. The metaphor of “Pomegranate” to a woman’s body is fascinating. I enjoyed and comprehended most of the poems.

Fox News used the great replacement theory to replace Tucker Carlson. How does it feel getting whipped by your own cane, Tucker? The firing shows that no job is secured—even the top-rated asshole like Tucker.

Let’s face it. Fox News is fake and bullshit. That’s why the network had dropped “fair and balanced” years ago. If you still watch and trust Fox News—after what Dominion has exposed—then you need to get a reality check.

Now I will learn how to tie an apron and unclasp
my bra from behind. I will become hard,
like a moss-covered rock. I’ll be stiff as a nightgown

dried on the line. When the pond freezes over, I’ll walk
to its center and lie face up until it is May
and I am floating. I’ll become an anchor
pitched skyward. I will steer chiseled ships,

spinning fortune’s splintered wheel. I will worry
over damp stones. I will clean ash
from the Madonna’s cheek using the wet

rag of my tongue. I’ll make myself shrine-like
and porcelain; I will stand still as a broken clock.
I will be sore from lovemaking. I will become so large,
my hair, loosened, will be mistaken for the swallow’s cave.

After June, there is a year of forgetting, after the forgetting,
antlers adorn the parlor walls. Then it snows, and I’ll be
coarse. I’ll be soft as my mother’s teeth. I’ll be sugar crystals

and feathery snow. I’ll be fine. I will melt.
I will make children from office paper. They’ll be cut
from my stomach wearing blank faces. Bald
and silent, they will come out of me: triplicates

holding hands. I will smooth their foreheads
with a cool iron. I will fold the tepid laundry, turn down
the sheets, then sleepwalk along the Mississippi
until it is ocean and I’m its muddy saint. I will baptize
myself in silt and December. I will become
a pungent, earthly bulb. I’ll pillar to salt. I’ll remember
the pain of childbirth, remember being born.

Ama Codjoe

Skiing season has just ended and I am feeling nostalgic already. I still want to ski and snowboard. My wife already bought Epic passes for all of us for the next season. Eight more months should pass by quick.

We are now heading back to the skate parks for rollerblading and scootering. Đạo still blades a bit. Đán just stops and he’s the best one out of all of us. What a waste of talent. Xuân is still very active with scooting. He progresses each day. I hope he keeps going and not losing momentum. He and I are the only two in the family who are still interested in going to the skate parks.

My blading has peaked. I haven’t learn any new techniques and I have been hesitated to take risks. I still enjoy blading though. I am thinking of giving skateboarding a try since I really love snowboarding. I haven’t been to an ice rink for months. I probably forget all of my figure-skating techniques. I’ll try to get back to it in a bit, but the weather is so nice out and the skate parks are always free. A public ice skating session costs $15 an hour. An hour on ice is nothing.

Đán is also giving up on piano. He no longer wants to practice. He doesn’t value the cost of private lessons we give him. I wanted to give piano a try, but I don’t want to spend $90 an hour for private lessons.