“I am quite captivated by the emotional intelligence of ‘Tree rings, like concentric ghosts’: its internal innovative style, the heightened, hexagonal poetics of My Tran’s perception, their sharp way of interweaving cultural artifacts with art, the past (ghost), sound (wind), and the emotional clarity in which they perceive the world around them. Their writing unravels steadily with great inner strength, research, and movement. They break the conceptual barriers between fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and permit them all to coexist as one old-fashioned, modern machine. I feel so lucky to be exposed to My Tran’s beautiful work.”

–2019 Chautauqua Janus Prize Judge Vi Khi Nao

BWR exclusive (a new excerpt from “Tree Rings, like Concentric Ghosts”)

Dickinson kept a Carlo. Carlo was a dog. Carlo was her only friend. For sixteen years she walked with him in the field of Amherst—the field, ceaseless, in the aftermath of Carlo.

One, Two

One

The sky is sad and beautiful like a large altar.ⁱ Empty fruit bowls and incense burning staccato. You think of the cockeyed squid where looking happens from two places, one eye follows the other. The conjunction holds both things on your face—simultaneous things. You will return to this moment in the second person, playing it on top of another participle. Woman, turning. Tree, glancing. Cat, running. There is a crease in you. Everything folds in the middle when you come back, sad and beautiful as it is.

Two

You have the instinct of a dog. Your mother warned you against this. She showed you how to chew with your mouth closed. How to eat like a bird. How to eat a bird? Break the bones with the back of the throat so no one can hear your wretched jaws. This is how to mop up the blood. How to hide feathers, or pick meat from between those bloody incisors of yours. None of this of course matters. It’s ugly to think you’d actually use your mouth for anything other than love.

One

Sad And Beautiful pulls through the window and folds over on the wall. You won’t notice at first because things will bend this way and that and nothing substantial ever folds over, so you go about your day or substantial looking at something else—her perhaps. Her photograph. And that tiny corrugation floating up in the corner of your eyes, it keeps folding with or without you. Don’t look. Maybe it’s a ghost—you know how nights are. First it’s a soft thing. Then shadows. Then geysers. Your eyes bouncing off this and that. Hush, my lovely heads.

Two

You go to make tea with blood from the river. Some nights you are scared of the hands in it—they will clutch at your pearls, your copper pail. You will bark at them, your other heads whimpering.

One

Tonight, Sad And Beautiful is a shadow. Others, it is a cat named Carlo—he scratches at your door, begging to be let in. He will not be let in. You will lie awake watching the wall, contemplating, for instance, the length of a cat. The duration of this. Can he lick his own back?

Tonight, it’s the shadow’s turn to scratch. Click. Wail. Whistle. Drag sidelong when a car passes your window. In red and hurries off. After which, slipping back to the same piece of wall, it will slot perfect in the temptation of another shadow, as leg in a perfect stocking—shadow on shadow, where in between a kind of distance happens. Undressing. Looking at yourself below temptation. Smelling of a cool earth from below. Or not. Remember how devastated you were when they took van Gogh’s bedroom and put it under one of those x-ray machines, and the walls were no longer blue? And it is possible that you will find something other than blue. This time there are creases, synonyms, sometimes even clues.

Two

You are obedience. Like a good wife or a small bird with a petite throat—your mother taught you well. Your husband grooms you everyday, with a boar bristle brush, dragging the oils to the tip of your blue hair. When he throws you a piece of meat you will swallow it whole, grateful, you will also choke. But just the tiniest bit to leave him wanting a bit more.

One

There is a crease in this picture. It folds just above her neckline, which is ominous, which you follow, as superstitions go. Softens the edge with your mouth the way she did before she ripped you in blue—mouthing, you can only get donkey cheese in Serbia. Did she really say that? All of you nodded. But it is a spoken silence, the way you can read without much opening of your mouth. Don’t lie, you remember what she said. Her lips like two beautiful creases—they broke open like a door. She let the cat in didn’t she?

Two

They say your mane is made of snakes but that is bullshit. It’s true you have three heads, but perhaps it’s not exactly accurate to say your heads are prophetic. After all, you can’t see past-present-future any more than the average dog with the average head count. Everything you say is revelatory but irreversible. That is the way of fate. So not at all prophetic.

To your left you speak in the first person. To your right you speak in the third person. The middle part says you, always with a kind of accusation. You did this to me it says, you? me? Don’t be ridiculous—you never speak at once. There aren’t enough lungs for you to do that.

One

The window is a painting stuck on your wall. This is a cliché, but also a vestige of the falleness in you, as clichés often are. You want to take it down. You can’t take it down—that takes wrestling, with an angel. Instead, for our purposes, you will think of that painting by Magritte. Beautiful World, 1962. Your second eye playing this picture over the slot. Sky on sky. Blue and blue. Where distance closes, where does blue relocate? You catch yourself heaving like a dog on a hot day.

Your brain a kind of leash, distending. You let yourself go there.

Oh god… what have you done to the world?

The Blue Hound

Birding as fishing happens through time gazing. No, not waiting. Anything but waiting. You graze time like a cow, eating the tender shoots. You go to a prairie to gaze. You go everyday. You have a favorite patch. This patch, you tell me is your favorite patch. I tell you to chew with your mouth closed. If they see your bones they’ll pick the meat off of it. The leftover makes for a low-grade fertilizer. It goes back in the soil. Bone and marrow. You dig your ghost muzzle into ghost dirt. You won’t find the bones. This is sad. I can’t keep watching you like this. Bone digging. Your ghost makes me sad.

One, Two

Two

You are C. For Cerberus. Your mouth is monkshood, wolf’s bane, leopard’s bane, mousebane, women’s bane, devil’s helmet, queen of poisons, blue rocket, aconite and some other flowery names. Your frothing spit bears the promise of love. I mean, isn’t there an Aphrodite who was born of foam?

One

Looking back you see the garden in blue flames. You mean like an apparition? In French it’s called au premier coup, which means at first stroke. At first stroke is colors rolling into one moment. Inside of moment, everything lays flat. Lays flat bone fold. Flowers boiled to a perfect repose to paint blue flowers on your walls—have you thought about how strange that is? Moments are flat and fresh in bloom, always in bloom. Through the creases, cracks, crumpling. Blue is that distance between you and your neckbone shifting out of place to kiss her again.

Two

You remember when he dragged you out of hell? No, you say, she gave me away. He didn’t have to drag I walked. All the way up to daylight. Was he beautiful then? I don’t remember. How about the lion skin—is it true what they say? It can tear like any skin like your mouth. I remember vomiting.

One

There’s a man, he hides under Picasso’s Blue Room.

Two

What sort of tea is this?

One

You look back and there is a shadow and is it shaped like a dog, it barks at you. Then it barks in you. Maybe a dog walking itself. Maybe a memory. They rotate, taking turn walking each other. You fumble around, looking for a leash, thinking you should walk yourself at some point. But where is the light switch outside? You don’t know outside, do you? If a dog you actually prefer the inside. The convenience of a lighting fixture—flip switches appeal to you. Click. Light slots against the skeleton of your room. You bark. Maybe you’re not a dog after all.

Two

Your husband chained you to the doors of the hell but for some reason you can still drink from the banks of Styx. The leash is long like his love, each link a tempered bone. You rotate your heads to drink. You roam the underworld with a hidden ease. Your chains clinking like the loose teeth in your mouths. The trophy teeth of your dead lover. You visit her at night. Her voice echoes in the canals of your throat. Here, she swims in the river.

One

Suddenly it is Noon and everything glowed like a dog’s spirit. You think of her ghost. White ghosts. White porcelain. Each kneecap and large bone pulling itself through the window in a huge river. Flooding you from that the middle place. Daylight makes you nauseous, creases you at the core. Your eyes watering a bit. It’s windy and the birds are loud this morning. Go. Close your blinds.

Two

Actually, I take it back—the cockeyed squid have different uses for each of its eyes, never seeing the same part of sea.

One 

Speaking of fish facts, you’ve got to buy wet food today. Carlo is getting increasing confused, every year around daylight saving. He keeps whining, and circling your ankle. This is his way of saying he is hungry, but also his way of saying it’s noon, as a clock, but with clock, there is a clarity that is undeniable. Noon and hunger fall apart every year, every time he arrives in March.

The Blue Hound

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, —

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do

If bees are few.ⁱⁱ

The spooky thing about Dickinson is that she was very much ahead of her time—knew about the bees what else did she know? Her poems are general set at Noon on the summer it is hot and I suppose the butter will have melted. She lived in Amherst Massachusetts so it must have been a little darker out. Dickinson stayed indoor. Except perhaps when going to buy butter. Except when going to find flowers. When going for a walk with Carlo. At Noon—in the summer—on a prairie—

One, Two

Two

For a short while you walked through the streets of Argos. It was unremarkable for the most part—you still have a nice, round vase from there—except you were remarkable and they gathered. Something in the way of you made people want to bark. Everywhere you went people hurtled into the streets, aprons, unkempt faces. You counted faces with steps, avoided cracks for superstitious reasons. Your mother was a kind of superstition above all. She slept singularly. Kept to her left side for nine months. Ate a lion’s claw, then a serpent’s tail. Drank seahorses like a protein powder. They say she dug you out from a crack in the earth. That’s true, she is very brave was what you told people. She lives alone. Sometimes you think about how brave she is living on her own but you do not like to revisit this fact.

One

The vet says it’s because he’s getting old. Butt dandruff not uncommon. He can’t bend over backward to clean himself. His breath is awful. Everything heaves out from that middle place every time he eats too fast, which is also every time that he eats. His lungs are sticking together. He has an attack every day and you watch him have it, every day.

Two

Half the year you will sleep with your husband. You like to lie by his feet—he drags them sidelong down your blue coat. You are soft for him. You both like this fact—it’s one of those things that you keep you in common. Facts and truths lodged in that moment before you. There is no distance that can describe its fragrance. A month? A year? Half a year? Has it been that long? She looks old from here.

One

The next day you went to sleep. What’s the point of being up anyway.

 Two

In Argos you slept in motels and ate vinegar crisps for the first time. Herakles, on the other bed. You resented his dog treats—but there you were pawing at the food bowl again. And with kind of beastliness you gave him your muzzle. He broke your food into smaller pieces, so as to tell you, both of you are now implicated in that moment of looking. No one can put a notion to it. Inward or outward you do not care. How tightly you gripped to his gaze. 

One

Maybe you. Maybe I. Maybe she. 

Two

My mother, she unraveled her breast. He has your attention. I wanted to go to war. A hero’s war, that’s why mom did it. I abandoned her and her breast. That’s what heroes do. You nodded, because you are sympathetic to stories, about mothers and you like clichés. How tightly you gripped to his gaze. 

One

What did it look like? A room.

Two

This is how to remember with a room. Was it Cicero who invented this? I don’t know he was after my time and from a different city. Anyway—for this you need to walk into your favorite room. Break the shapes into little pieces and hold them against the furniture. Break your mouth is the door. Break your skin the silver drip on the mirror. The chair on all fours. Yesterday I walked out into the garden into a kind of horror: an outbreak of pictures on the lawn like a season of Ren Hang—was it you who loved Ren Hang?

One

Your mother would have called it pornography. Or she wouldn’t have put a word to it, in the way that mothers never quite do.

Two

Have you read about yourself yet? Received a call? Messages after the dial tones? Click. Is it news of a body?

The Blue Hound

A week after Ren Hang died, I bought the book of his collected photographs. You can get it on Walmart, with a five-star rating. That’s a lie no one gave it a rating. Was he twenty-nine or thirty? Truth is I didn’t like the book—it’s very heavy and the pictures are kind of blurry, and some cut by the gutter. I spent the morning flipping through to noon, saw too many ass cracks and ball sacks, had to stop. Three-hundred pages worth of genitals—it makes a person tired. I don’t mean to shock it is simply Ren Hang. I do like his photographs in small increments on bright screens. The sudden splash of red. Asses blossoming from the brier. The weird glare from a flash light as if light comes from you, looking. Who is it? says the ass, and coy. No answer. Quiet. Then dial tones. I don’t want to pick up anyone’s calls, but the truth is that no one is calling me is what Ren Hang wrote, two years three months eight days earlier.ⁱⁱⁱ But who’s counting.

One, Two

One

The stranger calls from Provence, four times in a row, two days a week, doesn’t leave a message. Maybe it is more important to leave the impression. You do not call them back. They will most likely speak in French. You do not know French but there is the impression of it from a man across the street. His lonely planet on the porch fills up with scraps of language. In fact he is all language. Scraps of a blue planet fall out your end of the receiver. No body or the hassles of it, limbs, branches, a mouth—that is way of an automated call, also the way of language. In the morning language is the weather, blue skies, how good the day. Allo? he says have you gone to church lately? Noon and language suddenly forgets itself. Language cracks in the air.

Two

ratara ratara ratara/ atara tatara rana/ otara otara katara/ otara ratara kana/ ortura ortura konara/ kokona kokona koma/ kurbura kurbura kurbura/ kurbata kurbata keyna/ pesti anti pestantum putara/ pest anti pestantum putra^iv

One

Did he leave his box on your porch? Maybe. Maybe it helps to know what is inside. But the thing about a box is that you never know what is inside until there is no more box. Christmas presents, moving houses, mom’s parcels, the cat in that riddle with a slew of things that could go wrong—quantum mechanics, shards of glass, radiations. The impulse to shake. Whatever is inside can often be approximated with the shake. Meowing or hisses indicates a cat. Silence, a dead cat. Or, the very least, a very shy kitten. Some breeds don’t even make sounds like that—some so high it’s imperceptible. Then there is the issue of trying to understand, most of all, what Carlo is saying at different hours of day. Hunger. Boredom. Just for the sake of it. When the man across the street speaks, Carlo appears to listen. At times converses. They know something in the air that you do not. Incoherent boxes shaking back and forth. Yet on his distant planet on the porch, the lonely man still carries with him hours of day. Language goes to sleep at night. Carlo carries the conversation all by himself. Wake up to a sad cat poem.

Two

How did she get here? O he flew her over went to picked her up at the airport himself. Did he bring flowers? I think so but he didn’t bring them back. Not sure what happened or if they forgot. Forgot what? That it’s winter and there’s no flower. Were you excited? In retrospect, yes. Then why not come? Chain’s a bit short of the airport, and it was, a small car. Did she have a lot of stuff then? Was like going home but living out of your suitcase amount. What does that mean? I love you but no offence. Were you offended? Of course not she’s only here for six months. Not at all? Never. Good came out of it then? Change for laundry, meat, gin—I thought it was a good deal.

One

Sunday you go to the basement. This is where you find laundry machines. Sunday Carlo sits perfect by the door to basement. This is where he finds escape, into the dark dashing. You drop your hamper and chase after him. He is quick on his feet—sinks into dark. You turn on light, he finds dark room, or corner casting unto itself. It keeps folding until you are singularly aware of this precipice, locked in a gaze that will not stop. Memory stumbles through the both in that. Memory creases in the air. You take him by the belly and drag him up to daylight. You put the wet food out. Here. He vomits.

Two

Here are the obvious, observable facts about your lover. She carries herself with the stiffness of mothers. Her posture like a seahorse, which is to say perfect. Ghosts have always been kind to her. She is rarely afraid.

One

So, when you came up and saw the sun, was it with one head or all three? So when you retched, was it with one head or all three? So when you looked at her, and with all three, how could she bare to return?

Two

Well, she didn’t.

The Blue Hound

When time starts looking at you in return, a long time, there is to be said a kind of self-consciousness. Francesca Woodman knew about it, she said, I am as tired at looking at myself as you are at me.^v Tiredness is having to look back, turn around, lilt your head a little. An hour goes by. Dog-less, all of the sudden. Aged, thirty-six. The year being eighteen sixty six. The photograph is still an hour long—that’s an hour of staying absolutely still. Except you can’t. Except there is the absoluteness of image. How did I get here?— Time to clear my throat. Time to fall. Time before falling to sleep. Time myself. For if it took Woodman an hour to take a picture of herself by the end of her life, then be done with life by twenty-one, fell— How did I get here is a good question.

One, Two

One

When you visited your mom in spring all the flowers were gone. What happened to the garden ma? I’m planting new vegetables—when are you flying out? In a week. Okay. Maybe we could go to the museum I hear there’s a show for Woodman. Okay, do you want something for dinner? Fish soup, if that’s okay? Okay.

Two

There are facts and then, unbearable facts. Not unbearable because of their weight—you can carry anything—but for how plain they are. How plain this river inside of you, which does not stop swimming. And how unbearable they do not look back. You hated this way of pouring over, unrequited, every time like that painting, where you are the nape of your neck in a mirror. Plain, blue thing.

One

Your mother and her flowers she let them wilt through the winter, when you left in the night, to drown in the river in spring.

Two

In the morning, your husband swims in the river. Four a.m. it wakes him up. The thrashing of bodies carries his body downstream. You sit by the edge waiting for him to surface each time he takes one long breath that does not know its end, and which disappears from you like a hole in your chest, bird songs strewn in the air. Twenty laps up and down. His body stretched and skips. In the water. Flashes of a soul. Isn’t that what people say about breath, in the old country? Pneuma is spirit. Like oils in the water, slicks of it pull to the surface. Scamper up your paws like the sweet bleed of grapes in October. Iron, tannin, tongue, splashing blue bursts like the glass.

One

Death is hard. You forget to do things. Wash the lilies. Water the dishes. Burry your body in the backyard.

Two

You remember getting murdered—yes? It wasn’t your giantess of a mother. Nor was it your cleaving husband. Nor the wild rabbits by the bank, though they glow like a well. Nor the knife and the lamb shank. It’s how they described it in the obituary. Nervous drowning. There are no ghosts yet. That takes time.

One

Your father was a big man. Serpentine. But even he cried in spring. How to see sadness come undone in a parent? Terrible vapors scamper up through the slits. You remember, from the same place, hot earth, red sloshed up and splashed on itself. They called the slit Etna. Glowing and glorious is Etna one night, like a new word after winter, your father drove with mom and you in the back seat, back to the old country to witness Etna. You ate warm pastries and your father hated crumbs. No lunch. Family held to a perfect symmetry at the time, you didn’t know what it meant, to be in perfect symmetry. Quiet, hazy clouds. Slicks of oils on the window. Then a small splash of color. Your family wasn’t exactly a picture bunch. There was, little room to remember. Everything willingly burned with Etna. Your father, your mother, you, still warm. Dad have you thought about what to wear? A little. Maybe that red tie you like so much. O yes but maybe not for this. And lunch? 

Two

When can people eat after this sort of thing?

One

Pity the women who cannot tell time. Mother dead. Father alone. And here you are with your stomach howling. No lunch. Time goes past noon. Time lilts like a room. Its arms the weight of little wings, unbearable as God in the shape of a bird, or little fly things, or dead people. Arms open billow, wind-lift. How birds will take shape of dead people. Goes up and right through the glass. Door on the casket. Not long enough if she wants a way out. Not in fact a bird.

Don’t ring again. Don’t call. 

Two

Tell me, how did you get here.

The Blue Hound

Monday, she fell from the sky like a sunstorm. Landed on the floor above me. Tuesday, she found God in the kitchen.

What was God doing in the kitchen?

This is hard to prove but the same night I saw flashes of the soul on TV—blue whales, big finned beached and bellied up. To think they are either floating or flying something bluish comes undone. Something in the way of them can pull at animals—whales on a leash—birds, bees, clouds—dragged along every floor. Every sky is a kind of ceiling. By that I mean there’s life up there ceiling bears life. After all, why would mom talk about a man named Rochester. He hid life in the attic. Said also you could always feel it from under. Said she knew it from the start. Mothers have intuitions about these things.

What were they?

O I don’t know, sex, dry walls, candles, curtains. A sunstorm and it went and burnt the house down. Mothers always getting a headache from the weather, bought a whole lot of red lilies after I left that man’s bedroom, curtain’s a bit sheer and how timely, this woman I do know is now burning a map in the sky. I thought. But that was a thought I made before I made a deal with the man on Sunday.

On Sunday, our Landlord took care of them. Bees nesting in the plum tree. Plum flowers in the spring. I took care of them he said he takes care of many things. Bat things with the most tender, sympathy.

I slept with him that night.

One, Two

Two

To slake a thirst you have to find a river. A river and two bones.

One

Plain blue slab is how the river appeared to you in the distillation of a dream, everything poised and solid. Color in its cleanest form—or form in its color, splashing blue—clean, like the spring’s water. There is clarity in watching it drift from one end of the world to the other. Then a moment, just long enough for you to catch the brief blue thing, plunged with it your thought downstream. Was it a body? Maybe a blue fish. No, more feline. A drowning cat? Didn’t struggle very much and besides, how to tell if it hasn’t already drowned, or wants to swim. Some cats can swim you know?

Two

Six months is the price of a fruit. To be more exact: six of its seeds. You wonder how plain things would be if she had just eaten the whole fruit. Cut your hunger he said. Barely scratched at hunger. She went to sleep and came back up the next year, somehow full. Made a deal with sleep. Six months she is a bit older mom says, you look older? Mother’s voice means she is no longer in the water but will dream of it, as often as possible. When under it’s the opposite. Demeter growing old. Misses a beat. Sometimes a call. Always a toss-up between sex and mom isn’t it. Always a way of kissing your Husband on the lips. She is beautiful.

One

What would you do? If it were Carlo and if I were his mom I would slit his throat. Like mercy? Don’t be silly no one loves like mercy. Fine, give me a different analogy. When it was time to make dinner, and if mom was making fish soup that night, she would have me go in the backyard and scale a snapper. It comes apart with the back of a knife. That’s how easy it was. Light goes flying everywhere. Red light, mostly. So? it must be scary for people who are good at taxidermy, or dentists, to hold the people they love at night. See the bones, joints, slits, the perfect middle parts. Light goes spilling all over the place. Whose light? Okay let’s try this—do you know why Achilles died? Weak ankles? In the chain of events I suppose that is part of it—when he was born, Thetis took him to the river, held him by his feet. Purple stained the river. Immortality stopped at ankles. If she went below and deep enough there is infinite mortality, for everyone, and his feet, but Thetis didn’t want to be near that stuff. Mothers never do. She stayed on the edge as her son drowned and came back up more than alive except, as you say, the weak ankles. I don’t follow. Well I just think it’s kind of risky, to dip a baby in waters like this, upside down. Currents are strong here and mothers don’t really do risks, do they? O but you said she did. Well it’s obvious she made a deal. What makes you say that? I want to ask a different question in the same place, if that’s okay. If it helps. Great! Between cutting your son’s throat with a kitchen knife to be sure they won’t bury him alive, and hope for him to wake up, but then without you to drag him up from below this time—what would you do?

ⁱLe ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.’— Charles Baudelaire, “Harmonie du soir,” The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 96

ⁱⁱEmily Dickinson, “To make a prairie” (1755)

ⁱⁱⁱRen Hang, diary entry from “2014.11.17”

^ivAntonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 451

^vFrancesca Woodman, as quoted in Mary Kim Arnold, Litany for the Long Moment

My Tran is from Hanoi. They write about small things and animals. Their prose received the Chautauqua Janus Prize, Feldman Prize, Joan Wallach Scott Award, and honorable mentions from Kenyon Review. Currently, they are thinking about teeth, sea monsters and castration near the water, in Providence.