Don Share: This is the Poetry magazine podcast for the week of March 25^th, 2019. I’m Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine.
Lindsay Garbutt: I’m Lindsay Garbutt, associate editor for the magazine. On the Poetry magazine podcast, we listen to a poem or two in the current issue.
Don Share: Vi Khi Nao’s newest book is Sheep Machine, published by Black Sun Lit in 2018. Both her poetry collection, Umbilical Hospital, and her short story collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, were published in 2017. The poem featured in Poetry is in Vi Khi Nao’s newest, yet to be published manuscript, “Fish Carcass.” It was written in a burst of under fifteen minutes in one of the most intense locations in the world, Las Vegas.
Lindsay Garbutt: After an exhausting book tour, Vi Khi Nao decided she needed time to rest. She went to stay with her mother, who lives in Las Vegas.
Vi Khi Nao: I got myself into this unusual habit of walking nocturnally, because the heat wasn’t as strong and I didn’t have to wear a gigantic hat to cover these really strong rays of the sun. But then the nocturnal walks got a little bit too redundant, and I switched to diurnal walking.
Don Share: Reading the poem aloud, Vi Khi Nao says, evokes vivid memories of the desert heat and her increasing exhaustion.
Vi Khi Nao: It doesn’t make you hallucinate, so much; it gives you that mirage-like sensation, like part of you doesn’t really belong here. I walked this passage towards my mother’s apartment. Usually, it takes me about five minutes to walk home toward the end of my hike, but this time it took me an hour. I kept on losing consciousness, I had to crawl home. And because every time I stood up, I would lose consciousness, I would crawl a few steps, and then … Eventually I made it home, but it took me an hour.
Lindsay Garbutt: This intense experience is just one of the many “rivers of thought,” as Vi Khi Nao describes them, that are touched on in her recent work.
Vi Khi Nao: There is no other way I can express my existence, other than what poetry can do.
Don Share: Here is Vi Khi Nao, reading from “The Binchōtan Charcoal & Its Ash”
Vi Khi Nao:

There is no delusion that she wants her.
Is marriage like owning a very expensive art piece?

Your spouse the painting?
You the crooked frame that won’t fit?

Is this how desire is born?
From having less or from wanting more?

She wakes up calling her name.
She wakes up knowing that she doesn’t want less.

From House of Cards she learned a new rule: “I love that
woman. I love her more than sharks love blood.”

Or something along that line. She may have misquoted.
It came out of the pre-disgraced Kevin Spacey’s mouth.

Her God doesn’t exercise telepathy or residence.
Hands, eyes, mouths, authenticity.
It’s a city without mirrors.
Because touch, in itself, is symmetry.

—


She held the woman’s face in her mind’s eye &
realized that they would never be lovers &
as soon as she let her go, mosses grew all over
the geography of her hands and the woman’s face.

Is this because it’s a debt that must be paid for
not believing in somebody?
In herself?

She felt the desire of desire as if it was a binchōtan
charcoal and its ash.

Masakichi Yakitori
and the Pyramid Club.

—


On Easter Sunday, she sang a Christmas carol of Lao Tzu.
Lao Tzu, where is your power to persuade a tree from falling
asleep on itself?

Does night dream of actresses sleeping on leaves?
Where is the human figure in this?

Your Saturday is a memory without a body.
A pair of lungs that knew too much about your mother’s rape
tells you to leave reality through a threshold of a dream.

You knew how to be authentic. How to get rid of people.
How desertion works in the wilderness.
You exclude sound from your thesis.
It’s a way for you to desert poetry without being too poetic.

—


There were thistles inside of your mother’s vaginal canal.
She wasn’t violated in the wilderness. He has dragged her there to
say that it was okay to want pins and needles. She wasn’t numbed
after all. Her body didn’t pretend to be a God. Just a whimpered
Lao Tzu.

In a remote mountain, the men are smoking pipes and their vapors
smell like evergreen.

To punctuate their desire she says: God is being difficult. But he is
not.

I have to tell the world that I am sad and have been forgotten. Is
there a way home from not being homeless? Is there a way to swim
in an Indian reservation without being caught?

Listen: the isotope was just a trope.
There are ways to move smoothly in and out of insincerity.

We grow to learn how to brush melted butter
onto doughs shaped like the cavalry.
They arrive galloping on the baking
sheets without yeast in their armors.

—


Every Tuesday we acquire clues from the shape
of your mother’s scream.
When it was hoarse, it had the shape of a small bonsai tree.

Your cat licks you and licks you.

You know it’s not 300 bc.
Desire comes and goes while leaving lies to clothe themselves.

Her anger is a troublesome candidate of sadness—
lights itself on fire.
From time to time, the cunt of that fire grows ember by ember.

Once in a while, a house made of screams floats down a black river
on the planet Pluto.
Its chimney is not designed to ventilate silence or resilience.
It’s designed to allow screams to escape without suffocating
everyone inside it.

Once in a while the rain arrives to suppress the anger of the
scream.

When anger soaks like wet grasses on the house’s floorboard, the
ants come out to showcase their military might.

They resurrected the screams from their wet ash and carry them
on their powerful backs.
The aftermath of a rape is portable and transmutable.
A possible somatic experience for the ants, but may not be for the
human or the inhuman.

Lindsay Garbutt: I find this sort of “river of thought,” as she called it, so interesting in this poem. The way she goes from talking about desire, at the beginning, to talking about sometimes the terrible effects of desire, such as the rape of her mother, and then the sort          of anger and sadness and trauma that results from all that, almost generationally, so it’s not only her mother’s, but also hers. And all these things: the desire, the anger, the sadness, the trauma—they all sort of burn like this charcoal that she’s talking about. And the poem seems to ask, towards the end, what do you do with this burning? Do you scream, do you carry it on your back, do you transmute it in some way, and if so ... into what? Is it into ash, is it into a poem, is it into all the questions that this poem asks of us? And I think that that’s part of what’s so powerful about this poem, to me, is that it asks so many questions and then offers possible answers, but not in such a forceful way that you have to listen to them. You can kind of consider them, and then imagine your own way forward for yourself and your own burning desires and sadnesses and angers.
Don Share: She talked in her introductions about ... not so much hallucinating as having a mirage-like sensation. And I always think of mirage as things that kind of shimmer just in front of you, or even things on the horizon. Or maybe there isn’t even a horizon. And that’s kind of the poetics here. And it moves from moments of distinct, stark clarity, to moments that are harder to think about than that. So, for instance, “I have to tell the world that I am sad and have been forgotten” is so plaintive. But when you situate it in the sort of landscape that the poem is working in and from, it’s something very different. Because it’s part of a quest, a part of a searching, “Is / there a way home from not being homeless?” And this experience is oddly visual, I think, if you think about what she’s said and what’s in the poem. And that leads to the sort of problem, like, what happens to a scream? You know, a scream comes out of the mouth, and then it’s out in the world and it kind of goes away. It’s a little like giving birth to an emotion. And the poem is struggling with the shapes of things like screams, that almost … don’t stick around. They just sort of evaporate, somehow. Talking about that scream, the “mother’s scream. / When it was hoarse, it had the shape of a small bonsai tree.” Which is really striking because of how old and how long-lived those trees are, and how there is nothing linear in the way they grow, which must be the secret of their survival, too. That they’re sort of convoluted and both stubborn and delicate at the same time. So the poem is always finding these shapes for things, but without any self-satisfaction, moves on to the other shapes, and more shapes, and different shapes.
Lindsay Garbutt: Mmhmm. This shape-shifting also occurs with the pronouns in the poem. So I kind of assumed this speaker was speaking about their mother, but it’s actually phrased as “your mother” a lot of the time. And so you don’t know, is the speaker speaking to themselves, are they speaking to a friend, are they trying to speak for anyone? This changing of position that happens throughout the poem, from “I” to “we” to “you,” makes us feel unsure of our own location, kind of how she describes this walk that she was taking, that, you know, something that could normally take five minutes could take you a whole hour. Knowing exactly where you were was difficult. And it also seems to articulate this sort of ... collectiveness of some of these emotions and feelings and also what can possibly result from, as you were talking about, screams, is that they can be a sort of collective scream, or a scream can involve other people. What do you do when you hear someone else scream? What sort of clues do you find, as she said, in “the shape / of your mother’s scream”? How do we learn about ourselves through the emotions of others?
Don Share: You know, in that desert of the landscape, she says “Once in a while the rain arrives to suppress the anger of the / scream.” Which sort of ... the whole poem is about nourishing that scream and giving it life, “once in a while” it can be suppressed. And then the sort of atmospherics of life and emotion change, and the anger can be preserved, but also oddly sort of nourishing of that landscape, which seems so barren and has so much difficulty in it.
Lindsay Garbutt: Right. And that goes back to the title too, because, you know I was Googling what “Binchōtan Charcoal” is, and it’s often used for cooking. So the idea that this really intense heat can also be nourishing, can create something that we can use to feed ourselves is just ... a really beautiful twist on something that is really hot and difficult to handle.
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Don Share: You can read “The Binchōtan Charcoal & Its Ash” by Vi Khi Nao in the March 2019 issue of Poetry magazine, or online at poetrymagazine.org.
Lindsay Garbutt: We’ll have another episode for you next week, or you can get all March episodes all at once in the full-length podcast on Soundcloud. Let us know what you thought of this program. Email us at [email protected], and please link to the podcast on social media.
Don Share: The Poetry magazine podcast is recorded by Ed Herrmann and this episode was produced by Rachel James.
Lindsay Garbutt: The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. I’m Lindsay Garbutt.
Don Share: And I’m Don Share. Thanks for listening.