Editor’s Note
From the epic to the contemporary lyric, the narrative impulse in poetry is as old as poetry itself. While tracing this long history of narrative poetry in The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, Roland Greene and Stephen Cushman make a case that “the boundaries between narrative and lyric verse are always fungible.”
Kimberly Gibson-Tran’s ‘A Wat in Mae Sai’ exemplifies this fungibility best: it sets the narrative context for an epiphanic moment unspooling in frozen time, as the speaker contemplates the scale of human history in a Buddhist temple. What results is a poem that is interested in circular narratives: “I feel the old expansion of body / into temple, these ribs chicken-and- / egging—creator, creation.”
Also noteworthy in Gibson-Tran’s work is the juxtaposition of the idyllic and the dramatic. ‘Object Lesson’ features a group of young girls playing in a river and reaping the fruits of their cruel playtime activities almost instantaneously. Here, the sestina—a form that I previously associated with a sense of compulsion and obsessiveness—transforms into a vehicle for a scarring childhood anecdote, the rotating cast of end-words underscoring the story’s setting, props, action, and dramatis personae.
And so, this suite beckons: Kimberly Gibson-Tran’s unwavering devotion to storytelling invites us in with the timeless promise of story and song.
—Zainab Ummer Farook
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Mom had to scrub us down with salt.
It started when we played with plants,
elephant ear-shaped in a little river
where grainy gray stones scratched
our heels. A drop of water makes a pearl
in the crotch of a leaf. A preacher
lived nearby. Mom met with the preacher
while we played in the water, the salt
of our sweat trickled down in pearls.
We worked at snapping the ears off plants,
turning them into boats. We scratched
our names into the stones with other river
stones. We claimed everything, river,
bank, grove. We even played preacher,
dunked and sprinkled, scratched
crosses into clay. Then a grander assault—
after mauling the heads of the plants
how many frogs, eyelids like split pearls,
could we catch and hurl? We were pearly
white girls, ours the world. The river
gurgled. The necks of the cut plants
dribbled foam. They had a thing to preach,
a chemistry worth its martyred salt.
Chalky milk itched our skin. We scratched
back to the house, couldn’t stop scratching
our arms and legs. Blood pearled
in the raked lines of flesh. Our salty
mouths wailed. Tears in rivers
carved our starched cheeks. The preacher
and Mom stopped discussing church plants,
rushed us to the bath, pulled down our pants.
There was no place we had not scratched
raw. From the kitchen the preacher
tossed Mom a bag of crystals. Pearly
they glimmered in the showerhead river,
our sins screaming in the burn of rock salt.
O Preacher, does your hand still plant
churches? From salt a mussel scratches
out a pearl. We will wash forever.
Dad used to chase cobras through the yard
of our raised-up house in Bang Khla, or so Mom
tells me. I don’t remember those flying ribbons
zipping the lawn, never stared into the eye
on the back of their hoods as they were driven
somewhere next door. I think of them when
I think of the word wormhole, those slim layers
of muscle spinning a dark portal. In this scene
Mom grips my sister to her hip, watches
from the porch step as Dad does yard work.
In the eye of my mind I wind through her story
of holding Katie, of losing her grip when
the sudden slap of a long limb struck her
with fear. Then the creep of shame, seeing
she’d dropped her small daughter next to
a twisted branch.
It’s not my memory, though
I want to make something of it, of my parents,
of the wild life they threw themselves headlong into,
the way all of this makes them laugh over dinner
on the other side of whatever this was, the grass
growing tall. It could still fold under a long weight,
a crooked trail. I churn in its wake, stalking
after a thing I never saw, quick-splitting the hairs
of the grasses, an earless being that would only see
me in motion, rods on retina projecting a blur,
scales transferring muffled thuds from earth, moved
by primal instinct to flee to nest or den, lurk
until dark, glide out again.
Ten years and the air still
fills me with dread as I enter
under the glitter, climb the staircase
of shingled ribbons, spangled coils
of a gargoyle serpent fanning
its holy head. I take off my shoes
and approach the shiny figure
reclined in the back of the room.
I plant my kiss of lotus at his feet
and back away, this version of him
fine and feminine, a placid
smile, hairless brows arched:
immaculate, insensitive, and proud.
Suddenly I’m dreaming aloud,
pulled back ten thousand years—
before metal, time’s keeping,
writing, inflection of names,
even the domestication of grain
but not before we reined in God,
art, this cave’s snaking heart.
Even then the oldest idol was
carved another two millennia ago.
I feel the old expansion of body
into temple, these ribs chicken-and-
egging—creator, creation. I dole out
what occurs to me first: a line
in the sand, on a wall. There, the trace
of a hand—arched, immaculate,
insensitive, and proud.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Sumit Mehndiratta. Mucky Waves. All rights reserved. For more of Sumit’s great work, check out his Insta.
Author | Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Kimberly Gibson-Tran studied linguistics at Baylor University and the University of North Texas. She’s written critically about poems with Lines by Someone Else and has recent creative writing appearing or forthcoming in Passages North, Porter House, Oracle Fine Arts, Third Coast, The Rush, Creation Magazine, Public School Poetry, Dunes Review, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, Jelly Squid, Saranac Review, Paper Dragon, Saw Palm, Pandan Weekly, and elsewhere. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.
