VI KHI NAO is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
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On Textual Difficulty
Textual difficulty allows me to take wit to the next level of the linguistic playing field. Textual difficulty can also make one’s work more disruptive and when done right, more electrifying and sharp. I love and I try to condition the materiality of humanity’s mundane emotions so they align homosexually with my love affair with tenderness. Sometimes they express themselves non-linearly, awkwardly, and playfully on the page and I let them be so. They may look difficult, but they are not really. Humor is important to me. No one in the heteronormative culture wants amnesia, but amnesia exists when obvious connections appear to be absence, thus provoking humor. More known for my Sapphic writing, some of these poems here take a homosexual detour, provoking some comedic heterosexuality that resembles more loosely to a lemonade stand. This is where sometimes my writing stands: at the intersection between amnesia & wit.
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A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao
G O O D M A R R I A G E S S H O U L D L I V E O N I C E
Slender glacier teases the innocent husband
To hand over his wife, the ice tray.
The icy husband resists
Of course, he resists
The wife, divided and compartmentalized
Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side
Love is confusing: indeed, when husband can't gather wife together
On Sunday and on thirsty days
Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass
No one believes in singing with divided tears
A choir is required, and then a drink to quench the thirst of voices
Husband can't believe that wife
Can hold a mosquito that long
He can brush away her subconscious
By draining her of her liquid free will
Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely
Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello
Even solid objects can be unfaithful.
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T R A N S C R I P T S A F T E R E M P T I N E S S : O N
I N C U B A T I O N A N D R A P T U R E [i]
This sparkle, after the great forfeiture, fathered vacuity. Her mounting nerves at a loss.
After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.
Our desires—she clamps in her private closet for me.
Below the orchard: an unwieldy climate, burdened with crystal. Extra-large to counter the atmosphere of dampness—a lover’s heart, feasibly—never comfortable about releasing fear.
Her offspring unbuttons fragrance of verdant madness, hung to the tributary by a cedar tree.
If a sapling has to die, why not for bereaved moonlight? Its happiness, muted by light.
Abandoned in a rental car, love would fade, jokingly; not really.
* * *
It’s possible to surrender now, after the body resists rapture.
But a blouse forgives—
while waiting for spring to arrive—Her ears close their doors, patiently delaying the echoes from departing the room—as
A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river—
To change the discourse of time
But hunger, doubt, emptiness—these all travel flippantly, casually without lovers
Stabbing their backs
* * *
The summers came and departed. Leaving verdant holes in the sweaters of winter
Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything
Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance
Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped
To incubate is not easy, it’s easier to watch the eggs cross the street than the chickens
Every step counts, despite what the statistics of hit & run tell us
Don’t be deceived by the fake changes we see & report
We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we know they have a high tolerance for insomnia
So stab the night if you want; it won’t get you very far.
[i] Ayumi Malhotra, Mia: “Notes from the Birth Year: On Gestation and Becoming”: https://www.poetrynw.org/mia-ayumi-malhotra-two-poems/
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T H E A F T E R N O O N O N I M P U L S E
Just before morning closes Her deformed smile
Your hands dismiss Respiratory foams
Razored on the edge Your face
Couldn’t resonate with me So let us be foes in the aftershave