MEDITATIONS ON HOME
Bryan
Thao Worra
Home Is To Box
As
To Leave Is To Free
The
old Russian tells me: “I don’t express my freedom
By hanging things on walls. I travel.”
In
one country, no one stops me trying to leave.
In another, they only stop me if I don’t recognize
Words I was born among, such as “Sabaidee.”
In yet another, I can avoid incessant hawkers by going
A day without shaving and forgetting to watch
My floating world around me with any curiosity.
Returning,
they doubt by skin and prior destination.
A familiarity with Elvis and John Wayne
opens
surprising doors
For now.
My
love asks me: Pick a shade of paint for our home.
What a tether.
Imagining
chubby Buddha laughing if I keep attached
To the picket fence jaws of American dreams,
For
a moment, I envy Baba Yaga and her wandering hut,
The rivers she’s seen, the old mountains she’s eaten.
Projections Through A Glass Eye
On
the edge of Tu Fu’s immense roads of magic
My toes soak up ink like a paper towel
I
cannot help but desire to see
that incredible day
When
my account of mundane moments in the Midwest
Will appear as an exotic phoenix
feather penning
A fantastic epic on an extinct dragon skin
For
a beautiful young girl whose essential atoms
Haven’t even begun
To gather together yet
On
the border of an as-yet unfounded nation
So far from my own house
of humbled dreams.
Bryan
Thao
Worra is a Laotian
American writer. His books include
On The Other Side Of The Eye, Touching
Detonations, Winter Ink, Barrow and The
Tuk Tuk Diaries: My Dinner With Cluster Bombs. He is the first
Laotian
American to receive a Fellowship in Literature from the United States
government's National Endowment for the Arts. He has also received the
Asian
Pacific Leadership Award from the State Council on Asian Pacific
Minnesotans
for Leadership in the Arts. Thao Worra currently resides in the
Hawthorne
neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota.