“Cut #1 (Kitchen at Noon)” and “Cut #5 (Winds)”

By Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, Translated from Vietnamese by the Author

Cut #1 (Kitchen at Noon)

The blade, huge,

on which my daily

panic of a face

glimmers in a blur,

drives its sharp tongue clean

through the ripe, sweet cheek

of an early June mango.

Cut #5 (Winds)

One, two, three, then twenty,

and twenty more, perhaps fifty in total,

fifty pages of poetry

are all of a sudden lifted

by the plateau’s late afternoon wind,

carried away from the four small

hands of the two female poets

boating on the jade green

river by the Perfume Waterfall.

Some poems fly

down to the scented water, some waft

up the swaying pines.

About the author and translator:

Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng is a writer, curator, and translator born in Vietnam.

Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Margins, Jacket2, and various anthologies. She is the author of Masked Force (Sàn Art), the pamphlet-catalog to the exhibition of Võ An Khánh’s wartime photographs that she curated in 2020. Nguyễn-Hoàng holds a B.A. from Stanford University.