Ivory Tower
I carry you up the highest ivory tower, our limbs stranded in limbo, our hearing strained by earfuls of corn. We can’t prevent yellow from climbing into the windows of our cells, these faces painted by the brush tip of an August moon, young bodies rendered seasonal fruits of decay. We dress up as children of the corn for the afterparty, stalks of wheat brushing past our backs as we move to “American Pie” and I slur the chorus into the shell of your ear. This time of year is for blooming in the fist of folly, for swallowing beer with our enemies and smirking past our ghosts. Mere transplants, we breed ourselves from the gnawed-off roots lugged past our mothers’ illegal gardens. We eye the sky in our sleep, catch fireflies with the white-hot need of our teeth. You want to house a wildfire, I want to be caressed by that blind spot of belonging. Tonight I carry you up the highest tower with a match between my lips. I don’t set it free.
Bangkok 1945
A country served up on a hot plate,
cut, speared, bulleted, renamed,
trembles in tied and occupied hands.
A rock tossed over two oceans
lands on the tracks with a thud. In the right light,
it might become a pearl, deluded
into Venus. An untouchable sky
mangled in explosion rendered touchable
by yellow sprouts of gore
spilling from atomic heaven’s jaws
casts its fatal tongue into ash
inside a land of ruined smiles,
long chipped way into sunny myth.
Hands brace for impact the quiet devastation
of prayer a death of hundreds flinches
for no god makes no room for an empire’s
thumb to worm through the palace of breath
tucked inside valleys of a heart still heaving.
cut, speared, bulleted, renamed,
trembles in tied and occupied hands.
A rock tossed over two oceans
lands on the tracks with a thud. In the right light,
it might become a pearl, deluded
into Venus. An untouchable sky
mangled in explosion rendered touchable
by yellow sprouts of gore
spilling from atomic heaven’s jaws
casts its fatal tongue into ash
inside a land of ruined smiles,
long chipped way into sunny myth.
Hands brace for impact the quiet devastation
of prayer a death of hundreds flinches
for no god makes no room for an empire’s
thumb to worm through the palace of breath
tucked inside valleys of a heart still heaving.
About the Author
Para Vadhahong is a 22-year-old Thai American poet and writer from the South. Their work is published or forthcoming in Kingdoms in the Wild, Hyacinth Review, Lover's Eye Press, INKSOUNDS, Koening Zine, Ice Lolly, and Salt Hill.