A poem from the larger collection, An Autumn for Kora Mao.

October 13, 2017

Thai Isarn, Kirkland, with Pinkie Chan, digitally

 

Sticky fingers are made by wings.

Lemongrass, basil, chili.

Tonguewalker.

 

Ignore the game and eat.

Ignore the world and swat.

Daily lit everything ignores a pill.

Even at a quarter a world subsides.

 

Microgasms every taste.

Treat the world in utterances.

In fathoms and incomprehensibles.

 

Every ache to be held by it.

The way we identify this language

sending links to the Global Cambodia

seeing past understandings anew

and Thomas Pynchon holds the key

and perhaps he still does.

 

Trip of the consciousness lately

takes the wheel and endures.

We are smothered in offering.

It is the slide of the mind of the context.

It is the way sponge cake enters

and the removal of the cold.

A crucible of creativity.

A nurse log of a mouth.

Beer Lao on the eyeball’s horizon.

Tripping up on the sequence of image.

 

I hear the contemporaries trip and

I hear them coast into glide.

It is a stunning work of knowing.

It is the stunning force of presence

beyond the moment of steer, timely

and undeniable witnessing.

 

I sit thinking this breath bellies

of a Rain Dragon cutting east.

It is chilled, charming, a choice

that determines where we’ve headed.

 

That we schemed like candidacy.

Are we candid in our owning?

Does the question serve as a stop

under the language of austerity?