"Close Reading" by Brandon Som

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend September 26, 2019   Close Reading   Brandon Som

One for tree, two for woods,                                                                     I-Goo wrote the characters                                                                                           out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent: what wood made                                                Ng Ng's hope-chest that she immigrated with                                                                      —cargo from Guangzho to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me                                                            hope & waiting are one word.                                         _____ In her own hand, she keeps                                          a list of dichos—for your poems, she says. Estan mas cerca los dientes                       que los parentes, she recites her mother & mother's mother. It rhymes, she says.                                                                                              Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned down looks like dice                                               to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift,   she inspected the die of integrated circuits                                        beneath an assembly line of microscopes—             the connections over time                                                         getting smaller & smaller.                                           _____                                                                                                                          To enter words in order to see                                                                              —Cecilia Vicuña In the classroom, we learn iambic words                                           that leaf on the board with diacritics— about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years           accrues within one's words? What immanent                                                                         sprung with what rhythm? Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad by Dionysus awoke to find her son                                     dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit even if anachronistic. Data & river banks—            memory's figure is often riparian.  I hear Llorona's agony echo in the succulent. What's the circuit in cerca to short           or rewire the far & close—to map                                                    Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana's carpool?                                          ______ I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol                                                of everlasting, is sometimes packed with a new bride's trousseau. It was thirteen years                                               before Yeh Yeh could bring                                                 Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen                       & Empire were names of corner-stores                                               where they first worked—                                              stores on corners of Nana's barrio. Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca—                                                              she might have sung in '49 after hearing Don Tosti's                                       recording—an l where the r would be in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as                                                                          the song suggests change in the laundryman's till.                                          ______ I have read diviners                        use stems of yarrow when consulting                                                                                     the I-Ching. What happens to the woods in a maiden name? Two hyphens make a dash—                                                 the long signal in the binary code.                                               Attentive antennae: a monocot —seed to single leaf—the agave store years                                              for the stalk. My two grandmothers:                                                           one's name keeps a pasture,                        the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,                       it was with short, forced words                                     like first strokes when sawing—                                                                                             trying to set the teeth into the grain.            Copyright © 2019 by Brandon Som. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem   "In 1948, my paternal grandmother, Ann Lum Shee Som, with her thirteen-year-old daughter—my I-Goo—immigrated to the U.S. where they joined my Yeh Yeh and worked in corner-stores in the barrios of Phoenix, Arizona. My maternal grandmother Pastora Mendoza was sixteen that year and living in one of those barrios called El Campito. As an adult, she worked for thirty years on the assembly line at Motorola. Like my nana's work inspecting the semiconductors of some of the first cell phones, I'm hoping my poems can wire and rewire dialogue and understanding across languages and across borders." —Brandon Som   Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2015), winner of the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in San Diego and teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. Poetry by Som   The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2014) "Maps" by Yesenia Montilla "Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today" by Emily Jungmin Yoon "Los Angeles, Manila, Đà Nẵng" by Cathy Linh Che September Guest Editor: Eduardo C. Corral   Thanks to Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2020, who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Corral about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Your Support Makes Poem-a-Day Possible   Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. This free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on the weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038