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Lily, you grow delicately like the dreams in your undefiled mind,
internally defiant of your ambition to the people; kind, and graceful;
Loving all; Ivies and cattails envy you when you bloom lonely on single:
Lilypads, refusing to accept anything that you deserve. You must realize,
in time you deserve to be called by something so beautiful, and stop,
answering to everything but your full –
Name.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Lillian
“Bless her Heart,” he says,
to a product of display
but to her dismay:
Silhouette behind
numbers and comments – many
of which carry her.
“Who,” – should cherish her,
could take care of her
would love her: profile.
He saw her display,
with another hundred men,
behind glass windows.
Seeing an outline,
shape with no response throughout,
still, completely still.
“Hello,” she said
tight-lipped as a hushed shadow
in the faint doorway.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Who
Days pass in a timely fashion:
Slowly by daytime intervals, fast in a scale of seasons.
Moments happening without hurry,
quickly turning into memories –
with the quick approach of a future.
The world spins tilted,
in sections of dry lands, wet clouds, white blankets, misty fog.
Our minds are open, and our hearts are given.
Full view of and in full view:
sealed memories,
bottled ocean water,
brilliant minds,
endless miracles –
in a year of given time.
There are summers missed,
in a Secret Garden hidden under one tree:
barefoot dancing in our summer dresses,
talking of big dreams with bright eyes,
feeling like moments were timeless,
and nothing could change.
Yet leaves fall,
slanted, never straight;
unless, “it’s the way you look at it.”
A view of covered backs,
packed with essentials:
pencils, pens, paper,
dried flowers, devious secrets,
strengths, weaknesses –
of yours and mine.
to hibernate
and dream,
of a season
left behind.
To what we know best:
there is time,
a countdown,
an event,
a time,
to wait for,
to tell us:
when to return back – and start again.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Seasonal Change
I once thought that
anything I could touch,
I could
change,
and yet
everything I could see,
I could have a
different perspective –
nothing more
but than like the
Sun.
You can be right:
anything you can touch,
you can change.
Whether the metaphorical,
the symbolic told you
that you could not transform,
you can transmit: light.
Sometimes, you may not be right,
But tonight your point is
everything you will see,
everything you concede,
all you have yet to do is
believe that you can
Shine.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Sun and Shine
There are bad jokes I have, and I still tend to mess them up – they become twisted in my tongue, spoken to broken horizons. You foresee it daily, yet laughter exhibited. Nervous laughter perhaps, but your feet are grounded next to mine. I only trust yours to be.
Footsteps beating down hallways
Trivial remarks exhaled through airy breaths:
Bells ringing hourly,
What has time brought us next?
Twenty-Four hours, a bar of chocolate, bad jokes and lemon black tea. I always trust you to be outside my window with sugar cubes when I need, but there is a fore ground that is stepping further towards the horizons of school grounds. I never saw that motion coming. I must contain the fears of the both of us, but no – there must be another way.
Sun setting in the distance;
Clouds dissipating in the sky
The waves of heat are lingering,
What forth comes us all?
A Disposition. I speak in widths, heights, and lengths alone to reach your air – aura so high, so bright, so – artistically, intricately incomplete. It is hard to stop walking towards where the rain touches my skin under the clouds, where it feels comfortable, yet drift away, where I am called to choose my own form, and I wish to shape myself evenly between your persona, and waves of words to enjoy the view of a distorted horizon of what I sought to be between the chocolate and empty beginnings.
Tongue tied on long forsaken thoughts:
Fear trembling in my legs
Leaving the past
Dreading the present
A projected future closing in
I’m left stuck in between a distorted view in which I don’t know if it’s my eyes as they swell up with tears, or the fear of my ambitions. There is a sight – light of hope that I can choose from. Promises slipping between my fingers.
Warm embraces turn to shivers down my spine
Letting go of everything that was mine:
Comfort, friends, familiarity
Replaced with independence and a teen’s recognition of –
Morality.
Morality:
Loose ends of family strings and heart strings, and grey areas of right and wrong. If horizons stretch too wide to be read; right is deeply held in my thoughts to be let go.
Losing sight of the horizons,
Night seeping into my eyes
Stars twinkle and shine where my future lies
Fingers unlocking, feet stepping forward
Goodbye to the sun and hello to the stars.
I can hear a pair of laughter
fading into the distance:
Both of hysterical sadness,
and inescapable bad jokes.
– Emilyn Nguyen and Claire Teal, Written on the Horizons
Written in the Horizons is written with one of my closest friends, Claire Teal (CT). Inspired to write a “Call-and-Response” type of piece, we strove to write in the perspective of two people, through prose and poems. She took on the role of the character who wrote the poems of this piece, as displayed aligned to the right of this piece. As you can [hopefully] decipher; as the characters progress, they are influenced by each other. We hoped to portray their growth throughout the piece. I am so humbled to be able to work with her on this piece. She is a talented poet with a successful Instagram platform where she shares the majority of her work. I highly recommending checking out her work. Her poetry ranges in an impeccable range of genre. Many times, I find them close to the heart, capturing the beauty of poetry in aspects of love, happiness, and even darkness. Her links are posted below. Huge thank you to her for working with me on Written in the Horizons!
Claire Teal:
He says that in his roots,
his grandfather told him:
pride was sky head high.
Soaring upon elevated clouds,
accentuated white – blue skies.
Never to leave time out in the sun to dry.
In the strings of our kite,
you’re starting to cut the strings to the memories,
and while speaking to each other in blank hands gestures,
glaring eyes: “Don’t let go.”
The wind tastes of empty jars
blurry rings of tree trunks,
meaningless life left behind –
meaning gave up hope,
tying hope to your heart strings so we’d laugh –
in pride and play, willing to free your hand to hold mine.
It’s been more than sixty days,
foolishly, by sixty nights outstretched,
Language bonded whispered in the wind,
we should never be left with blistering knuckles hanging onto the strands,
distinguishing old men to my father,
his grays dripping from the eaves,
then promise not to stay, too afraid so you call it sacrifice:
No war for a boy turned man.
Sixteen bordering Eighteen to be drafted,
swallowing blood.
You tell to me from your roots,
“It’s okay, if we don’t know what we’re doing.”
You love everybody too hard – too easily,
so even if you pretend – each dead body changes you,
apologizing endlessly – it becomes a habit.
Be judgmental to yourself, better safe than sorry.
but forgiving to others – always – in guerrilla warfare.
You remember their names – all of them.
All of those love letters –
You were talking about them,
describing what their hands looked like.
Good men with guns.
Good men, and bad men: the same.
You shot them, and the bad men stopped showing up in my dreams.
You shot them, and the bad men never stopped to show up in your dreams
In shame.
You never had thought to be fighting for your life again after Vietnam,
Your grays made history, realize that your own company counts too.
No war for a man turned boy.
Covered in the debris of war,
my father tells me your heart beat is slowly safe.
For you, the honey hasn’t been sweet for years,
your teeth rotting to gravel enamel.
They changed you, your black hair to gray.
My mother doesn’t know that half of it, she doesn’t believe it.
Tell me, that’s why she says you turned your back,
I’ll understand, but you say,
“She doesn’t want to believe that all we’ve buried was found.”
It’s okay, we are all trying to forget the ones we lost.
You’ve been renting out your body for whiles now,
And it’s still not home, now that you’ve escaped, forfeited, you’ve lost.
Your roots are the making of your growth,
the world counting its patience peace,
elderly quickly, at your bones;
stiff and brittle: eroding like stone, bleeding, drying blood
defining bravery as my shoulders shrug, throats burning:
No war for a man turned hero.
You’re going to bite your tongue while reading this,
I won’t let you swallow the blood this time.
Be a boy turned man turned my father’s father turned my grandfather.
I see your eyes when I look into the mirror –Damn it.
You admit you won’t be home – you’ve won –
no hands can hurt you now, save you now.
The memories are running gray, and the colors are disappearing slowly and all at once.
No war for the man turned gray.
From the clouds,
guided by the whispering wind,
I entered and have spotted land.
I confessed that,
“I do not know what I’m doing.”
You’re not here to save me – this time.
I am saved,
it is by my own weak hands –
debris under my fingertips –
twenty taking off four, as sixteen –
lie to protect the soul of a grandfather’s tragedy.
Now my hair turning gray,
No war for the roots faded gray.
No war for the roots faded away.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Grandfather’s Grays
“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” ― Tom Wolfe
I watch a man:
nameless sitting on a straight-back wooden bench in front of the Highline,
comfortable at the sight of crowded sights, noisy air, chaos erupting – yet
staring into the city streets, busy cars, assemblage of people, and tall buildings caving in with a hundred years of memories played out on the skyline
surrounding him, overwhelming him – relieving him.
I witness a man:
closing his eyes, stretching his legs out straight, getting up, reaching out
to the tragedies, stories of existence, watching the movement of the people
and replicating them, shoulders and arms moving aside, running his hands across the bench, feeling the wood linger in his touch, transferring into him, thinking of the names that exist gathering in a pool of crowds, what they look for, what they find.
I see a man:
on one that was more for pliant days, to realize that nothing is truly called by name,
walking towards me, approaching me, waking to find that sunlight is not just done in millennia, there are no questions that I cannot answer on my own – yet.
He said, “No, perhaps not,” to himself. There are people calling a name,
but he is silent only paying attention to his surroundings as if he belonged to this city.
I know a man:
as a lightness between the buildings peaked through, yet consolidation something I did not know, my breath begged a voice to answer. A expression without impression,
sitting down in the bench he had sat upon, sitting, closing my eyes, stretching my legs out straight, watching the movement of the city over me, looking for existence, running my hands on the wood…
I hear him ask, “What are you searching for?”
– Emilyn Nguyen, Dear New York, I Belong to You (Dear New York Series)
Circles within circles clenched in a fist,
finger prints of mothers, fathers, of fathers oncle, ma grand-mère et grand-père,
Vietnamese blurred French – English dialect – adopted.
Held captive by four corners – owned by simplicities of mind, lesson well learned.
Combination of two sides, cinching an aged tradition,
Recycling words, welcoming of solitude in circumference chasms.
Plated orange-yellow poles upon, crimson grading pens upon, pink erasers upon,
yellow painted light wooden pencil between the webs of my fingers,
foreign and forced upon my uncoordinated hand,
ached and cramped knotted upon them, strung upon my tangled fingers – alien.
Blind to possibility, possible to the blind,
your warm hand guiding mine, gliding streaks of graphite-lead onto smooth bamboo paper.
Inked loose leaf paper upon sheets of bent thoughts meant to be traced upon.
Handwriting of the foreign, different from the raced,
language to be taught, words to be learned,
syllables chopped, from tongue to lips, to be refused by air,
my lips followed yours, by a semblance in matter,
your dashes guide me, synchronizing to your hand before smooth, a poem you wrote.
Sawed cut chopsticks to count upon mixed upon erasers, grips upon,
wrinkled skin between clenched newborn fists,
opened wide, exposing the wings they possessed between each finger,
creases created to count with father’s hitchhiker’s thumb,
until one realized that there was more to count,
with the spaces between mother’s joints on her wide hands, and long fingers.
Canisters of undeveloped films, reminders that one has not rendered,
Fluent spheres develop in your mind, death-sentence tolled,
A color and composition – segments of hued breaths you took between shutters unraveling that you belong—intertwining my foreign fingers in your hair.
Words you’ve forgotten, shriveled hands cracked,
I wrote the words you could no longer teach me: to have met.
– Emilyn Nguyen, To Have Met
Among a white room, come blank semblances of shadows,
whisper are tangled between specks of madness.
Thoughts – possibly of weakness are apologetic through an unsighted telescope,
quiet contentions,
restless legislations,
tedious clicking…
Fractions, fragments, and frictions of fictions in formal semantics: Nascent.
For other remote time swarming, zoning , warping,
to have reduced to one – rarely.
As a paper of processes for phylum,
through an algorithm of Ambien:
Repetitive tides of people here, in blurs. Click.
Faint flights of fright in foreign tongue, frail to forbidden fore seers.
Reflected upon the intimidation in immigrant irises,
their apologetic extermination returning to one,
As a share of the atmosphere roaring,
through exterminating cries, fighting tension,
Fog hazes faces and subsides as one. Click. Click.
Skilled hands twist to intertwined grimaces beclouding another,
hazed from one profile to presentation.
Slight slithers to another shoulders, words slurred as
deep sighs, long pauses — speak so silently, quietly.
Wait so mysteriously by civilization,
familiar frowns, similar scowls. Click. Click. Click.
A beacon just drifting midair colliding with others amongst the atmosphere.
Floating, with the breeze , to be forgotten when death is inevitable,
lie in the in between a course of immortality and early death.
afraid of admitting that they are lost,
lost as a pinnacle,
in complete abyss… Click Click. Click. Click.
If we never met, then I wouldn’t have to lose you.
Mistake Conscience with Fate – destiny with luck when bitterness overcomes you,
that there is a pattern in the narratives, you don’t want to admit.
There is fork in the road, where your soul gets indecisive.
There is a crossroad where, there is a light, where you yearn to explore,
for everyone’s own world to collide.
There is a collision
with their own thoughts expression – those you don’t know about…
Click. Click Click. Click. Click.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Counting Countenances
“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”
– Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters
Reading Virginia,
as if I understand her morals.
“Do not,” She has written.
Analyzing Woolf,
“One cannot think well,” she says.
my tongue is dry of new air, to “…love well…”
“…sleep well…” – Nightmares mostly,
leftover sleep and a dew of overdue promises
evaporating off my lips, purging with blood.
She ended, “…if one has not dined well.”
I began: “Do Not Speak to me about Hunger;
Speak to me about War.”
Here I stay: barefooted in between
airport tile floors – they tell me,
Gritting my teeth to the dreams,
forbidden desire and will to shining silver linings.
The cruelty, unrivaled, taking parts of a dream,
leaving most to die, but she’s hungry,
they told her the war’s over, but she won’t heel,
filling a God-sized hole.
– Emilyn Nguyen, In Between the Lines
↠ Emilyn's Journey ↞ 