Tri Nhan 004 By the Altar of Desire

i am becoming a vessel     a husk
one brimming with song
illuminating in me a lust

i break my fast     i long
to sit under the persimmon
tree      asking someone all wrong

questions     tabooed permissions 
may i? may i? who am i to you?
may i pluck or is it a given

i am barren on some moon? your moon?
before my awakening      i never wanted
to die or to burst in tune

now i am open to be haunted
wanting to inhale incense
& smoke of ten thousand

Lucky Strikes   their ashy essence
bewilder my wires in hypnotic fog
in its current—another presence

who is so clearly you (yes     you) lost
in my flared eyes—forest of purple timbers
scabbed with electric moss

you undress me in the river
meant to poison this refugee     i am ready to die
yet i want so much more        i want to deliver

answers to who am i? how am i? how am i
to you? naked   praying    on my knees     may i be
so strange & gorgeous & deified

The Collector Comprehends Time

time:
    how they measured death

death:
                                                             incomprehensible

incomprehensibility:
                                                                                                                                    terrifying

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Mylo Lam was born in Vietnam and currently lives in Los Angeles. He and his family are refugees from Cambodia. Mylo’s work has been or will be published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Nightboat Books, Mānoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Margins, and elsewhere. His multimedia work won Palette Poetry’s Brush & Lyre Prize and has been selected for the International Poetry Film Festival, his poetry won Blood Orange Review‘s Emerging Writers Contest, and his chapbook AND NOT/AND YET was published by Quarterly West. He has an M.F.A. in Poetry from Randolph College and Ed.M. from Harvard University.