#kien lam

[mortalpractice]

Autopsy

I am told it is easier to trust me if I show you my hands. Imagine for a moment how the rib cage looks like a second pair of hands nestled over the lungs— this a sleight of hand. And imagine that beneath the bone you can see the heartbeat. Imagine, even, that it beats for you. And then. And then it stops. Not the heart but the imagining. How easy is it to pretend to be something else. It is easy to breathe life into something inanimate. The hard part is keeping it alive. Take, for instance, my hands. I have taken them back from you, but now I don’t know where to put them.

— Kien Lam, published in The Offing

[lifeinpoetry]

And the word for that loss is too big to fit into a single word.

Kien Lam, from “Guerilla Theory,” published in The Kenyon Review

[homonymph]

It is a type of worshipping to just live. Each day I perspire a bit of my body to the sky, and it returns me somewhere else. Like this I have been practicing how to leave this world my entire life.

Kien Lam, “Turn Around and Look at the Wild Dog”

[salttigerpress]

Someone looked at a tree and called it a tree. Someone else looked at a tree and called it whatever the word for tree is in Vietnamese, which I don’t remember anymore. And the word for that loss is too big to fit into a single word

Kien Lam, Guerilla Theory, in the Kenyon Review Online. Read it in full HERE.

[windowcatpress]

“Part of me is always ten years old and too small, puberty-slow and too poor to be wasting time on games, so when Lin sinks the winner in Toronto and the large Asian crowd goes wild like they’ve never seen an Asian man be the guy, like they’ve never seen a caricature tear a hole in the movie screen and crawl out, the way cartoons used to dig through the center of the Earth and find themselves in an imagined version of China—” — excerpt from “Linsanity” by Kien Lam (click through for audio)

[mortalpractice]

I’ve heard the way some people breathe at night and it made me want to close their mouths. I think inside all of us lies an animal trying its best to escape. It wants to press its feet against the earth. It wants to be held by the air’s weightless arms, the constant rush of nearly falling, its soft breath whispering something I can barely hear.

Kien Lam, from “Lustless,” published in The Margins

[mortalpractice]

When a baby bird fell from a branch hung over our house and shuffled into the open slider door, I cupped it in my little hands and set it outside, hoping it would push its wings against the sky the same way a child pushes the ground to stand up. I listened for hawks. I told myself its mother found it and thought nothing of the human scent caught in its feathers, a bird's fear of humans an urban myth, a story I still recite to owls at night when they ask me who I am. I tell them about the boy who cried wolf. I tell them to listen to the moon at full howl, to rain collecting itself between my clavicles, how it drowns the little bacteria living on my neck. When one sense goes out, the others heighten. I hear better at night. I don't answer the owls' question. I am a self-aggrandizing dance. What I mean to say is all the things I don't see or choose not to see may yet find a happy ending. The baby bird buried its mother before it died of natural causes. It is survived by many children who sing songs from high branches and power lines. My mother always told me to keep a few secrets. Hide them in the world. I've palmed her pregnant belly and thought: this is violence I can appreciate. It kicked me. It kicked me. I felt it grow so slightly.

—Kien Lam, "Quantum Theory," published in Memorious

[mortalpractice]

I've seen my father swim once. I watched him bow his body into the pool the way a swan dips its head beneath the surface. He stayed under for a long time. When I learned he was gay, I thought of his head emerging from the other end of the pool. I thought of the nights he spent with my mother, how he held his breath for a long time.

—Kien Lam, from "Swan Song," published in The Margins