Paul Tran
America Is a Dream I Must Wake Up From
Nobody knows this is how we lived—
I lie next to you
in the blue
room flooding
with dawn.
You kick awake,
rest your hand
against my cheek.
I turn and smell your fingers,
which I want
inside me.
The ceiling
fan whirl
like helicopter
blades
taking me
to the battlefield
where my grandmother buries
her child
in the dirt:
a pigeon
with its chest
split open,
its bleeding heart.
Call it love:
Call it a pattern:
my legs held up
as though on the skyward curve of a swing.
I can fly off
into heaven
from here.
On my back,
I pretend
it’s desire
not another soldier
reloading
his machine
gun,
firing through my body
—a sheet of blood
drying
in the dust-lit room.
Paul Tran is a Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net-nominated poet. Their work appears or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, & RHINO, which gave them an Editor’s Prize. They received fellowships & residencies from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary Foundation, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Home School, Vermont Studio Center, The Conversation, & Palm Beach Poetry Festival. They’re the first Asian American in 19 years to represent the Nuyorican Poets Cafe at the National Poetry Slam & Individual World Poetry Slam, where they placed Top 10. Paul lives in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing& Poet in Residence at Urban Word NYC.