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[Music intro]
LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.
LYNNE THOMPSON: Two California poets were finalists for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and one of those was Mai Der Vang. In addition to the Pulitzer, her collection Yellow Rain was also a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the L.A. Times Book Prize in Poetry. Yellow Rain has been described as a book that “combines archival research and declassified government documents to examine the biological warfare committed against Hmong refugees at the end of the Vietnam War”. Mai Der Vang teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
LYNNE THOMPSON:Today’s poem is "They Think Our Killed Ones Cannot Speak to Us" by Mai Der Vang.
They Think Our Killed Ones Cannot Speak to Us
As if to adjourn all oxygen from the neck is how they try to take the voice As if attempts to render us pale Ripped lungless from woke into wild ash As if ashes cannot blink howl testify with the pulse of their own tatters As if hymn and whistle Hail and pour We’e seen how they shame the light Stripped hollow tearing out filigrees of stars from protocols of dust to make drink a bouquet of venom sprayed down a constellation’s throat They must be so earless as if we’ve no legs to kneel We are each other’s memory of the future forty years from here Arriving at ourselves by way of the dead History will not beget powder will not beget myth will not make us into marginalia As ever possessed by what we have lost There are no language barriers in the afterlife A toxin is a toxin is a toxin in the man made truth is the dead who leave everything behind
LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!
[Music outro]
- Back to Poems on Air: Episode 62
DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.