Poetry: mythologies by Thomas Nguyen
Thomas Nguyen’s poem makes of the readers own body a delicate collection of pine needles and mud. With greens and blacks and marbled whites, “mythologies” reveals a world dark, haunting—we’re all, by the end, thirsty with prayer.
mythologies
& remember you were born
of the river’s silt. when your mother
knelt, thirst became prayer, timeworn
& plea. her hands, another
offering. remember that the water
held her. that when the sun burned veins
into her arm, there was no crackle & hiss,
only choiring sparrows that roost
within the night of her hair. remember
the froth above the stream’s marl, porous
& bone-white. that the brittle press
of her spine was formed from nothing
but shiver. when wind filled the grooves
of her frame like a home. when her body
lay sealed in its shrine, you were the friar
chanting for its rise.
Thomas Nguyen
Thomas Nguyen is a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied neuroscience and creative writing. He is currently completing the MS in Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University and hopes to pursue an MFA in poetry afterward. His work is forthcoming or published in the Bellevue Literary Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, DIALOGIST, and Nashville Review, among other journals.
