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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
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
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
(Sometimes) Lovers are strangers – recipients of commerce.
Lend me a pen for swooping calligraphy.
Give me a time,
a place at the Willow Tree
blooming orchids of fate but,
(You) Mourn bliss, sacrificed for Oblivion.
No sense,
no Holy Halos –
Hopes to be forward but short –
hopelessly distant,
Birds (have to) bless you
beneath the sun’s radiance –
fly to you, to wish to embrace you.
Carrying penned words of:
ardent thanks,
sincere sympathy,
greetings …
then sealed.
Free (fall) freedom feelings:
blushed cheeks,
scarlet smiles,
faint porcelain skin,
(Before) falling head on in love with words,
setting skies, and singing birds –
I fell over my heels with reminiscing of home.
Free (flying) as the high atmosphere –
unslept hours staring at the depth of his breath,
To stare to an endless dream.
(Let go) Exhale a petal,
pick a petal,
my dear mockingbird.
Love me or Love me not –
pick a petal,
drop a petal…
Thoughts (so) breathlessly taken,
here or there,
timed and placed.
(You) Send me part two,
(can) will fly from heaven,
and back to me.
When birds (fly) amongst the sky to you and (back),
Only to settle where it may: (to me)
penned –home.
– Emilyn Nguyen, Pigeons
La Joconde1
Now that you’ve seen her face,
the skin between his fingers tingled of the emptiness of a brush:
That smile illuminated the world around her –
her patented smirk, softly carved out;
her delicate features,
her piercing stare spreading,
contemplating.
There are many counting countenances of those who try to replicate her – I.
the skin between my eyebrows, in wonder, in utter introspection,
Those eyes confused the audience around her:
For there is a woman with confidence in beauty.
Exceeding all manifested bounds.
From 1503,
From a canvas taut with lack of a woman’s color,
scraped the muter shades with a blade’s edge,
Layering her textures – alive.
Seeing and
Painting myself over the top.
Her paths are painted inset – layered beneath the certainty and knowledge of her years.
All of this useless chaos swirling in about these empty distractions, and feeble
pretense –
as you stare back at her, the roads seems clear.
Her scintillations glow a bit more gold than white,
in front of a locale of open fields, feared of windblown hair.
She is the center of the color blocked mountains.
Her perspective is in my self-possession.
Her lightly dust on her powdered skin
shading in soft contours in vibrant hues of blues
and, reds and, yellows and, greens as forests grow.
Blending dusky shades and blurring shadows
to highlight regal undertones.
The names became opulent
a match for your alias,
She was Bernadette, Carol, David, Leo, Meryl – Myself.
Finished in 1517 to –
She is seen through the glass of geometric pyramids,
I am standing behind a crowd until I am the only one left standing,
And I have become her eyes, and her contagious smile.
I know what she in the canvas is saying:
“I know what the wind tastes like,
and I am scared no longer.”
To be a woman,
to be a confident woman – with ambition , dedication and pride…
To have the eyes and a smile illuminating the world around her,
To be La Laconde.
– Emilyn Nguyen, La Laconde
1: La Joconde: The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci (French)
“Don’t come back here! I have a bomb,” he said with no hesitation in his voice.
With an undertone of laughter, he pointed at me with pure determination to frighten me away. As laughter arose from the depth of the leather bus seats and the black aisle, he was joined by the other kids in roars of squeals and giggles. I walked down the bus aisle to find an open seat, praying it would be the next. As he pointed, I took a few steps back. Hold your head high. Hold your tears back. I heard my father’s voice in the back of my head. Hold your chin up, look him right in the eye. I remembered my grandfather said in his story of a war he once lived through. His wrinkles on a corner of his eye as he pounded his fist against the table to get a strong point across. There was no fear in his eyes, his body figure was tall and strong as I looked up at him. I’ve been through this before. Pre-school, when I came home with red blotches on my skin – bruises forming from an abusive friend. She was ‘just kidding’.
As I made me way to the back of the bus to find a seat, he began to chant louder into my ears. “Don’t come back here! I have a bomb! Don’t come back here! I have a bomb! Don’t come back here! I have a bomb!” he repeatedly shouted. A silent storm started to erupt. Snowflake turned into hail as its rage, but I forced the tears behind my eyelids till it ached; till my heart began to pound harder and my skin began to react to the heated yellow bus.
Slowly but cautiously my feet started to move, as if courage was something I was taught; as if my heart could tread any faster or as a myocardial infarction could erupt. My feet were weights, dragged on by life, as it must go on. My dry slanted eyes of my ethnicity forced tears back until my eyes were a desert that never sought water. My hands climbing back to the back while eye were captured on me, my hands trembling towards every seat. A treacherous journey, day by retched day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by slowing second. My head was constantly on a move to find a seat. I repeat: a seat.
My eye caught onto a girl crying. I remember her face. Her long dirty blonde locks down her back. I remember her. “Sixteen and pregnant”. I remember her name from the whispers down the hallway. To believe them was enforced by the cliques of popularity. She was a savage sent off from the clique: let go. A used tool of a popularity game. True or not, she was human, and beautiful. Her beauty was a bright, glowing face, blonde hair down her slim figure against the others in her group of friends. Her face in the hallways, as she stopped me. My face covered in acne, from the late nights stress and heredity’s genes. My eyes in complete shock to what exploded out of her mouth, “There might be some acne cream to fix your face, but it won’t fix you.”
As if the rumors were worth a death of innocent girl. Rumors hold a fate, as if words meant more than truth. Jealousy raging and fighting an innocent girl who gave me the same fate. I looked at her, and her eyes were placed on mine, and I opened my mouth and said, “I’m sorry”, as if there was no past between us. I smiled at her, and her tears started to ease. Her stained face of mascara started to dry upon her face. She smiled and started to laugh among the other on the bus.
Quick remarks, and kind hearts could only go in such way. Maybe we met at the wrong time, and that’s what I’ll tell myself for now. Maybe one day, years from now, we’ll meet again, and we could give a friendship another shot. For now laughs from afar seemed too close, and hallucination-like views were too real to be forgiven. Chanting kids like screaming angry chimpanzees on Animal Planet.
If finding a seat was this difficult, maybe walking a few miles home seemed to be easier. I turned away and started to walk towards the exit of the bus, the bus driver giving me an ugly stare, “Where are you going?” he asked. The bus monitor’s stubborn eyes glared at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. ‘Sorry’ seemed to be the only thing I could say. I repeated, “I’m sorry”. Sorry, a word of apology, a word for expressing pity.
“Nothing to be sorry for, but please take a seat,” he said.
I nodded. “Sorry.”
Again, a seat on a full bus of kids was rare. Two in a seat. “Can I sit with you?” I asked a girl. Her brown hair was put up in a messy bun, her soccer cleats on her lap.
“No. This might be too close to the back for you. I don’t want to be hurt by the bomb too.” She replied.
I nodded. Again: “Sorry.”
I reached the back of the bus, closer to the boys who acted as terrorists. As if my eyes defined who I was – it did, but as if it defined who I was in the inside. Stereotypes are too mainstream.
Closer I came to the back of the bud, kids were joined in by other kids on the back of the bus, one screamed, “Do come back, maybe It’ll straighten out your eyes!” Laughs started to erupt, exploding from a volcano. Sparks falling from the sky, first piercing my skin, then burning it, killing me. I sat next to that boy…the bus monitor asked him to move over so I could take a seat. His eyes were watering. I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t taking his bad day out on me or if it was from the laughter. As if it was funny from the beginning.
To this day, these words still ring throughout my ears, and it’s still packed in the back of my mind. I still remember the people who were on that bus, their faces and how they still give me dirty glares as I pass down the hallways. Maybe a few years from now, in a café shop, we’ll get along, and maybe we could give it another shot, starting with a hello.
I looked at him with his spiky hair in class today, and he helped me pick up my stuff when I dropped it. While picking papers up, our hands collided and our head bumped, and I didn’t realize it was him, but he has the same eyes: blue and bright. I forgave him for everything…”Sorry.”
– Emilyn Nguyen, To Be Sorry
↠ Emilyn's Journey ↞ 