One day my father said, Get in the goddamned car,
and so I did, and he drove us about five miles
out of town, where he parked on an empty shoulder,
shut the Ford’s engine off, and then turned to me
and said, You have a weak personality. I said,
What the hell does that mean? And he said, You know,
when you speak, the way you talk, laughing and using
all that fancy-assed, flowery language, you do not
impress other men, serious men, for whom life
is a serious business. I said, after a long silence,
weighing my fate for what I was about to say,
I don’t give a flying fuck about impressing
other men. I can tell you, though, that I care
about impressing Patricia Lea Gillespie,
if that’s the sort of thing you’re worried about.
You read poetry, he said. Yes, I do. I even
memorize it. His eyes widened. Why would you do
a thing like that? So that I can recite it, I said.
Here’s one that I recited to Patricia Lea
quite late just the other night. And so I began.
His car at that time was a two-tone rusted-out
Ford Falcon with a sluggish, nervous ignition, so
when he quickly reached for the key and turned it,
wrenched it furiously, swinging that small tragedy
of a car back onto Hiway 83, and headed for home,
I began, as I say, not just for the moment
but for all time and for all young men caught
in the rush of passion and sudden confusion
when the heart cannot speak but the man—oh yes,
the man-absolutely must, she’s so beautiful,
the moon in platinum waves rippling down
her raven-black hair, and I rolled down my window
of that piece-of-shit car and I sang it out, far out
beyond the stalks of uncut wheat, beyond the corn
and soybeans, oh ever beyond the soybeans, and even
the beef cattle standing mute behind barbed wire
in a boredom so gigantic, so heavy it should
put God to shame, beyond Bryan’s Corner where I once
saw Kerouac and Ginsberg and William Burroughs
stopping for a cheeseburger and fries on their way
to south Texas and future literary fame and
an almost endless supply of what native Texans
called Marihoona. My poem, I swore, spoken loudly
and very well as my father stomped the floorboard
with every burning word, would never end,
even after we hit the gravel in the driveway
at home and I finally leaped out and took a bow
for Dylan Thomas, and all of Kansas rose up
in the dry fields and applauded the art of poetry,
and Patricia Lea Gillespie later that night
gave herself to a boy who loved to read poetry,
a language so sweetly powerful and burdened
with the mysteries of the human heart that it became
my language:

In my craft or sullen art,
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms…

And I remember the grim, tight mask of his face
inflamed now by the porch light as he lurched
for the front door and I sang to Kansas poems
I so loved that they became a kind of revenge.

B.H. Fairchild

A new word I learned today in the bleeding-control training. Tourniquet: a device (such as a band of rubber) that checks bleeding or blood flow by compressing blood vessels.

Cô Ba, người chị lớn của ba tôi, vừa qua đời ở tuổi 94. Nếu có thiên đàng, tôi tin chắc Cô Ba sẽ được vào cõi đó. Theo tôi Cô Ba xứng đáng với chữ hiền hậu. Trong cuộc đời của tôi, tôi chưa từng gặp ai hiền hơn cô. Cô thương yêu mọi người trong gia đình từ đàn em đến đàn con đến đàn cháu—trong đó có thằng cháu này.

Khi người vợ thứ nhì của ba tôi qua đời để lại hai đứa con gái còn thơ, cô đem cháu em về nuôi. Cô thương yêu đứa cháu của mình như con ruột. Lúc còn nhỏ tôi cứ tưởng người đó là chị bà con của tôi. Sau này lớn mới biết chị là người chị cùng cha khác mẹ với tôi. Đến đây giờ, chị vẫn xem cô như người mẹ ruột.

Tuy trong hôn nhân của cô gặp nhiều khó khăn nhưng cô vẫn chịu đựng không oán trách. Lần cuối tôi về Việt Nam, tôi cùng ba đến thăm cô. Ba tôi và chồng cô đã không hòa thuận với nhau mấy mươi năm. Lúc tôi và ba tôi ngồi nói chuyện với cô thì dượng cầm cây dao khoai tiến gần đến chúng tôi. Ông chửi thề đòi chém ba tôi. Tôi đến gần dượng, nói nhỏ nhẹ, và cầm giữ lấy tay của dượng. Dượng bớt giận và quay đi.

Tôi trở lại ngồi kế bên cô mới thấy cô run rẩy sợ hãi. Tôi nắm lấy tay cô thì cảm nhận được bàn tay lạnh ngắt của cô. Tôi nói với cô đừng sợ không có chuyên gì đâu nhưng tôi cũng không an tâm để cô ở nhà một mình với dượng. Tôi đợi đến khi mấy anh chị đi làm về tôi mới tạm biệt cô ra đi.

Đó cũng là lần cuối tôi gặp lại cô. Từ lúc đó cô đã yếu đi nhiều. Mắt cô không còn thấy nữa và cô không còn đi đứng được. Đàng con của cô rất hiếu thảo và cũng rất thương cô. Các anh chị đã tận tình tận tâm lo lắng cho cô đến giây phút cuối cùng.

Tuy giờ cô cũng đã rời khỏi cõi tạm này nhưng cô vẫn mãi trong tim của tôi và trong cả dòng họ. Con cầu xin cho linh hồn của cô được bình yên.

Last Saturday night, I couldn’t sleep thinking about my relationship with my second son Đán. I pulled out my phone and watched clips of him when he was in kindergarten. He sang Spanish songs beautifully, tickled Xuân to make him laugh, and learned to ice skate for the first time. I laughed and almost cried. Nostalgia rushed over me. I missed the cheerful, joyful, playful Đán.

As a second child, he has grown up way too fast and changed drastically in the last five years. He becomes taciturn, impatient, and unhappy. He revolves his world around computers and video games. He’s no longer interested in any outdoor activities even though he is so darn good at snowboarding, rollerblading, and hockey skating. He was also good at playing the piano. He doesn’t even want to hang out with his dad and brothers. He is drifting away from us to spend more time on his digital device.

I tried to help him, but I failed. He was miserable when he was not allowed on his PC. His rage and his behavior were increasingly getting worse. As a parent, I am conflicted. I don’t feel good forcing him to do things he doesn’t want to do, but if I didn’t make him go to the skatepark or to the mountain resorts, he would have dropped every activity. At the same time, I want him to have his freedom. I want him to be more in control of his life.

I thought back to when I was his age. My mother didn’t restrict me from doing anything and I turned out fine. Maybe I should do the same with my kids. I had been backing off and letting them do whatever they wanted even if they played video games until midnight.

My heart is completely simple, of one
substance like a mole, a dark heap

of pigment mired in a bland
it doesn’t mind. My mouth

is a promise in a driver’s-side mirror
and adjusts with a button that gives

with a pinkie flick. My feet demurely
callused because I will work and work.

I may as well have had just one organ,
so simple am I, one tube, like a sea sponge

with brine washing my osculum,
crumbing up my fibrous pores. There is nothing

scary, amiss, or unrelatable about me,
who am comme il faut. You’d think

I was a plant, you’d think, No problem!,
getting closer. Nothing to see at all, folks,

though no impediment to lingering
should you choose. What the bleached coral

don’t say: how they drank today’s hot chalice
all themselves. No one put me up to sipping

risk and sitting pretty. What the reefs
don’t tell twirls deep in their two-dozen

thousand fevered genes, similar in number
to the human, though sickened by the sunblocks,

the way you like your skin to take the light
without absorbing one thing. The things

you hear down here. Even the lowing whales
replicating every sunken liner’s final strut,

I let them go on, I am after bigger psychic fish,
I stand before Sancta Simplicitas and let her twitch

my veil and burn my books. I love an idol
who permits a dish of meat at each foot,

the dark flesh and the light, the spectrum
of the hunt. I love a good Doppler effect, am game

to the sluicing vowels and half-heard yodels
moving beyond my sessile place. But you who take

redshift to excess, always eluding, evading,
evaporating, why so wary? You, rounding

a corner like a double-glassed bodega when I
would have settled for heartfelt credit.

I have tried labor and I have tried play. I looked
into a tiny compact and saw the big face

and the tiny sponge. I, prey for dregs
of attention, four drags on a light that’s good,

I know, for a dozen. When I take up your day
and suck it down like a bag tight with helium,

daffy and lung-light, I am not sustained.
I am dying from taking. My gullet

capers like a piccolo. If I could have the whole
of you, the denser thing, pie weight

and plumb line, the vital pith, I think it would
enough me for beyond. You’d hardly notice.

I’d give you back, I promise, to yourself.

Laura Kolbe

Richard Blanco’s How to Love a Country is poetic, poignant, and patriotic. Whether writing about his own history as an immigrant, his own gender identity as gay, his own grief on gun violence, Blanco’s poems are all about America as a work in progress. After reading this collection, I could see why Obama selected Blanco as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet.

I wanted to write a poem about delay
The white space between word and music
One night in Ohio a decade ago
Under a thunderstorm’s bad blank verse

As I counted aloud between lightning and clap
A friend tackled me to the ground
To shut me up so he could hear it, the faint
Percussion I could just call thunder

If I wanted to be clear
I’ve tried to write this poem for years
But can’t and won’t, as every line
Falls faster than I can chase it, acid raindrop

Seeping into clover, garbage lyrics
Rising through its stem, poetry almost
As toxic as the city
Spraying my neighborhood down

A pesticide to x the little messengers
So megafauna can continue
Planting real estate
Some sad poet named this chemical Duet

The friend who tackled me got sick
I visited as he received a drip of what I called
Quicksilver in an early draft, but it was just
Poison, I mean chemo, which saved his life

Duet on the apple blossom, duet in the core
Nights drift by to be surveilled
For words, as thunder splits the poem again
Half of it standing up and counting

Half of it tackled into clover
Pollen painted with our syntax
Pulses once then meets a cell
The rain is light years away

Daniel Poppick

In addition to changing the wordmark, I made the switch from em to rem unit for my typographic control after a Slack discussion with my former colleagues at Vassar. I used em for scalability and inheritance, but em could cause compounding sizing. Using rem seems to avoid the headache; therefore, I might as well making the switch.

After reading Robin Rendle’s note, I added this new CSS element on all my headings:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

I am not seeing the effect yet, but I hope it will just work in the future once browsers support it. It’s not a big deal. I still like to tinker around this site as often as I could.

I am in the middle of listening to John Gruber talking with Jason Kottke about web design, Movable Type, and web development. I have tremendous respect for them on how they could turn their blogs into full-time jobs. I am not sure about Jason, but John is doing pretty darn well with the sponsorships on both his site and podcast. I don’t subscribe to their RSS feeds. I just check their homepages every once in a while. I can’t keep up with John’s podcast either. I only check in once in while for something special, like the latest episode about Kottke.org turns 25. That is quite a milestone. Congrats, Jason.

Vài tháng gần đây có sự thay đổi trong công việc khiến tôi căng thẳng, thậm chí chán nản. Tôi tự khuyên mình đừng lo xa quá chuyện gì đến sẽ đến. Những gì ngoài tầm tay mình thì cũng không thay đổi được gì. Nhưng làm sao không lo ngại khi tôi còn có trách nhiệm nuôi sống gia đình.

Đôi lúc cũng tâm sự với bà xã về một số vấn đề tôi đang đối diện nhưng rồi lại ngại khiến thêm một người phải lo âu. Người ngoài cuộc cũng không giúp đỡ được gì. Thôi thì cứ tiếp tục đến đâu hay đến đó. Khi một cánh cửa này đóng lại sẽ có cánh cửa khác mở ra. Hy vọng là vậy.

Tuần vừa rồi trước khi bước vào cuộc họp, tôi vẫn bâng khuâng không biết chuyện gì sẽ xảy ra. Tôi cũng đã chuẩn bị tinh thần và tự nhắc nhủ mình rằng dù chuyện gì xảy ra cũng phải giữ bình tĩnh. Đừng để cảm xúc của chính mình làm mình mất đi lý lẽ. Đã có một số chuyện không tốt đẹp xảy ra khi tôi không tự kiềm chế được cảm xúc của chính mình. Tôi không muốn điều đó lại tái diễn.

Bỗng nhiên tôi nghĩ ngay đến mẹ. Tôi xin mẹ giúp đỡ cho tôi nhưng tôi không biết yêu cầu mẹ giúp đỡ điều gì. Thế rồi cuộc họp diễn ra và kết quả êm đềm hơn những gì tôi tưởng tượng. Mọi chuyện coi như cũng tạm ổn. Tôi cảm thấy thoải mái hơn một chút cho dù tương lai không thể biết được. Một lần nữa, phép bí ẩn của mẹ đã giúp tôi vượt qua một khó khăn trong cuộc sống. Cám ơn mẹ nhiều.

The head of the fish thuds
into the kitchen sink

with a splash of lettuced water.
She says, Not this. Don’t

marry the head or anyone
too cunning. She saws the knife

through the tail. The muscle
springs. Not a man

who doesn’t have a brain.
There’s no meat there.

As I walk through fish markets
lined with skinned goats,

their heads on the tables,
the finned bellies glisten under

the dusty sun, jutting
proudly blue and silver.

My mother’s voice asks me
if I understand, if I’ll resist

the smooth talk from the fish’s
mouth, his fanned tail swaying,

gifting a breeze on the back
of my neck. I prod the slick,

elastic skin, pierce him with two
fingers, and eat around the bones.

Su Cho