Pos Moua and Lisa Dominguez Abraham
Monday, September 9, 2019 at 7:30 PM
Pos Moua lives in Merced, California, with his wife and five children. He is an educator and a member of Hmong American Writers’ Circle (HAWC). His first chapbook, Where The Torches are Burning (Swan Scythe Press, 2001) gives “an account of love and family and identity in the poet’s new land.” His latest collection of poems is called Karst Mountains Will Bloom (Blue Oak Press, 2019).
Excerpt: The Whitetails
Light had yet to make lines
of death and desire visible
among the sky, when a young Hmong hunter trailed
into a patch of young pines; he wandered as if
he had sullenly forgotten that he was walking,
his .22 scoped rifle in hand, chambered and
ready for tree squirrels …… Then the drumming of his organs halted when he saw
in the evaporating dawn three lonely, timid figures.
A pair of gesturing antlers pointing
into heaven, their long ears flapping
away gnats, their heads slowly nodding—three of them—a tiny fawn, its mother, and father—
approached the hunter as if to study him; it was like a long
ensuing stare between two people of a
dividing country—and the young hunter held up
his rifle, not to shoot but
to capture through the scope the sight
that is like a red painting
dancing in the wind on a snowy field,
and they flew back into the wild and hewho was lonely once again sat down
on the ground that was then already wet,
the ground that was dust.
from Lantern Review
Lisa Dominguez Abraham lives in Sacramento, California, and teaches at Cosumnes River College. She won the 2016 Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest for Mata Hari Blows a Kiss and both the Bazzanella and A Room of Her Own Award literary awards from California State University, Sacramento. Her first chapbook, Low Notes, was published by Red Wings Press in 2007. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Poetry East, The Cumberland River Review, Tule Review and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, among others. In Spring 2018, she was the featured writer in Suisun Valley Review.
She is also involved in community activities involving art and poetry, participating in the “body stories” series by the Sacramento Center for Contemporary Art, based on the work of mixed-media and video artists koo kyung sook and Sandra Davis, and writing and performing “Respite” in response to Wayne Thiebaud’s “Flood Waters” as part of the Crocker Art Museum exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud: The Homecoming.” Most recently, she wrote “Disguise” to accompany painter Frank Ordaz’s “Stella” for the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission’s “In Response: Poets & Artists in Dialogue.” The poem and painting are now a sign and mural in the Auburn, CA Central Square Art Park.
The parents enter exhausted, ears ringing
with the evening commute, with radio news
of bombs in Kabul and campus gunfire
one town over. Even among sparkly cardboard bells
each thinks ahead to a fast food dinner
one more damn time, then bills, then laundry.
Then the curtain stutters open. A third-grader
runs to the piano, arches his hands and plays
Pachelbel’s canon in D, notes chosen over 300 years ago
still true. The adults shift and raise eyebrows—
surprisingly good—he’s like their own kids, noticed
mostly in fed-up swats and after-bath cuddle.
When, in his short years, did he learn
to wait as end note fades into prayer?
Next, a chubby, messy girl walks onstage.
Mid-December, she wears navy-blue shorts
bunched at the crotch and stares at some back corner
to focus, to project her voice in tones so pure
adult smirks freeze. Somewhere outside
the stars are brightly shining
and the audience holds still, listening
as though she sings a nearly forgotten secret,
as though she herself is the winter secret
whose breath exhales promise.
from Cumberland River Review
