"Close Reading" by Brandon Som

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( September 26, 2019 [Close Reading]( [Brandon Som]( One for tree, two for woods, I-Goo wrote the characters [character2][character2] out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent: what wood made Ng Ng’s hope-chest that she immigrated with —cargo from Guangzho to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me hope & waiting are one word. _____ In her own hand, she keeps a list of dichos—for your poems, she says. Estan mas cerca los dientes que los parentes, she recites her mother & mother’s mother. It rhymes, she says. Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned down looks like dice to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift, she inspected the die of integrated circuits beneath an assembly line of microscopes— the connections over time getting smaller & smaller. _____ To enter words in order to see —Cecilia Vicuña In the classroom, we learn iambic words that leaf on the board with diacritics— about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years accrues within one’s words? What immanent sprung with what rhythm? Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad by Dionysus awoke to find her son dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit even if anachronistic. Data & river banks— memory’s figure is often riparian. I hear Llorona’s agony echo in the succulent. What’s the circuit in cerca to short or rewire the far & close—to map Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana’s carpool? ______ I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol of everlasting, is sometimes packed with a new bride’s trousseau. It was thirteen years before Yeh Yeh could bring Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen & Empire were names of corner-stores where they first worked— stores on corners of Nana’s barrio. Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca— she might have sung in ’49 after hearing Don Tosti’s recording—an l where the r would be in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as the song suggests change in the laundryman’s till. ______ I have read diviners use stems of yarrow when consulting the I-Ching. What happens to the woods in a maiden name? Two hyphens make a dash— the long signal in the binary code. Attentive antennae: a monocot —seed to single leaf—the agave store years for the stalk. My two grandmothers: one’s name keeps a pasture, the other a forest. If they spoke to one another, it was with short, forced words like first strokes when sawing— trying to set the teeth into the grain. [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2019 by Brandon Som. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. ["Close Reading" by Brandon Som]( About This Poem “In 1948, my paternal grandmother, Ann Lum Shee Som, with her thirteen-year-old daughter—my I-Goo—immigrated to the U.S. where they joined my Yeh Yeh and worked in corner-stores in the barrios of Phoenix, Arizona. My maternal grandmother Pastora Mendoza was sixteen that year and living in one of those barrios called El Campito. As an adult, she worked for thirty years on the assembly line at Motorola. Like my nana’s work inspecting the semiconductors of some of the first cell phones, I’m hoping my poems can wire and rewire dialogue and understanding across languages and across borders.” —Brandon Som [Brandon Som]( Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books, 2015), winner of the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in San Diego and teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. [more-at-poets]( [The Tribute Horse]( Poetry by Som [The Tribute Horse]( (Nightboat Books, 2014) "Maps" by Yesenia Montilla [read-more]( "Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today" by Emily Jungmin Yoon [read-more]( "Los Angeles, Manila, Đà Nẵng" by Cathy Linh Che [read-more]( September Guest Editor: Eduardo C. Corral Thanks to [Eduardo C. Corral](, author of Guillotine, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2020, who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a [Q&A with Corral]( about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our [guest editors for the year.]( Your Support Makes Poem-a-Day Possible Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. This free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on the weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. [make a one-time donation]( [illustration]( [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit [Poets.org](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038