PHAYVANH LUEKHAMHAN

My child died on a night like this.

The world was buried with snow then.
I rocked her, heavy as a stone on my shoulder.
I have read that death has square toes.
It is a house without walls.
Or is it hardened, malformed heart?

I stayed through that last breath.
Nothing sang and nothing sings yet.
No one holds my heart like a chin.
Or claws the numb within.

published in The Leaf Gatherers: Pocket Poems by River Poets Journal and Lilly Press (c) 2008

Shortly after I’d returned from San Francisco, I was sub-letting an apartment downtown. It was 2000. I’d been on my own and reading a lot. Watching reality TV and discovering the subduing power of crossword puzzles, which I pulled from the paper each day and fell asleep solving. I’d wake up with inky smudges on my cheek, where I’d fallen against the newsprint.

This was the time I started reading self-help books avidly. Tony Robbins, Dale Carnegie, anything I could get my hands on. I don’t remember what book or what phrase even, that caused my epiphany. Perhaps it was the force of all that advice all at once. My lesson was: I was depressed. And I needed to get out into the world and face it. I suppose a shrink could have told me that. But I didn’t have one. I made an effort to go for a walk every day. And though it would be years still before I involved myself in the community fully, and regained a sense of self, it was a small step.

During this time, a Census taker had come to the door looking for information from the household. What could I say? The family was in Africa. I wasn’t really living there. The interaction with another human was too much. I mumbled something like no thank you and shut the door in his face. I’m sorry, man.

There’s a place on the Census form for the head of household. That person is called Person 1. Here’s a poem I wrote about that time.

Person 1

2000 is 4 years beyond the clear-front cage
of my daughter’s bed

48 months past nights swiveling on the stool
kissing her feet with my hands, patty-cake

2000, the Year of Lists: books read, letters sent
replies, junk, movies, recipes, the Year I Discovered Grits

208 weeks following 24-hour nurses
the needle of despair barbed to her forehead

2000 folded half-inked crosswords littered
my sublet, my massive stain

1460 days after I chose my father’s name
she was person of the earth, Phaylynn

2000: Year I Forgot Myself
2000 times a thousand plus a thousand times

1 Leap Year later, those 9 days of milk
labeled, frozen just in case

Sometimes we need time to breathe — to do SOMETHING (just one thing) that diverts us from our grieving. Today I went to breakfast by myself and journaled. This while Dan slept in. It was a wonderfully bright and bracing day, as often winter is. I walk down those streets every day. In the time it took to walk down a city block, I remembered spring time and the dogwoods in bloom, the children sprawled out on the library lawn in summer and the brilliant falling leaves of autumn.

Here’s the first draft of the poem I wrote after I attended the first bereaved parents support group last year.

In that room

Where the hollowed out parents meet
The heater clicks and whirs to soothe their shivering
In that bare echoing room in the library basement,
The mothers and fathers crowd around conference tables pushed together
And huddle about their aborted jobs
Of seeing to adulthood those once bright hopes that were theirs
Their children, taken from them
Too young–always too young, whatever the age.
Someone passes the Kleenex around the table.
Another offers a tattered photo album
And between the sniffles and the heartache,
The stories. Of the now dead. Graduations,
Beliefs, desires. And too, the coping.

They hug and shake hands, strangers come together
To find out who else among the living share their scars.
Now banded together by their grief, the rise and exit the room
Which held them, warm and into the bracing endless night.

Sometime in January of last year, I had noticed a flyer on a community billboard looking for bereaved parents to form a support group. I tore off the number and held it in my pocket for a month. Found it, lost it again. The gold colored stub wrinkling and softening in my pocket. I had not had the courage or the wherewithal I had been looking at these little scraps of paper for the last decade. Numbers of people to call and “talk” to, locations of the local Hospice or Compassionate Friends meetings. Nothing the I came across Nothing called out to me. This was not any different, except that I’d been tired of carrying this secret around. And I thought, what harm could it do? It was probably time to get on with my life anyway.

Then the floodgates opened up for me when her birthday came around. I was, as usual, unprepared for it. And so I put off calling the group. I didn’t want anyone to see me in this mess. So I called the number later that month, told the woman my name and situation and attended my first ever bereaved parents support group in March. It was held in the spacious basement meeting room of the local library. The parents were gathered around a long conference table and the place echoed when we spoke and the heat registers clanked in the background. I arrived fifteen minutes late. Everyone had already introduced themselves. Someone was the woman I had spoken to over the telephone introduced herself and asked me a little bit about me. And I told them, I don’t know where to begin I said. I think they asked me questions.

I know it was not long before I started blubbering and hiccupping through my sentences. And this is where I always end up when “talking” about it. And talking is what most compassionate friends ask from me. “If you ever need to talk, call me.” “Here’s my number. Call me if you need anything.” “Do you want to talk?” “Maybe you need someone to talk to.”

It’s not fair that I didn’t know what “talking” meant. In my family, it was taboo to “talk” about our problems outside of the family. But we’d also never talked within the family either. I don’t fault anyone for this. It was what it was. By the time I started junior high, I’d started talking to school counselors. By the time I was done with high school, I’d been scolded over and over again for “talking” to them.

If I’d have had a blog when I was still living under their roof, I can’t imagine the grief I would have gotten. But since my family no longer holds as much power over me as they did then, I will tell you: I loved them, and I wanted so much to talk to them. Openly. I wanted to hurt. I wanted them to witness my hurt.

For reasons unrelated to Akira’s death, my family broke apart and went their own ways. I ended up in San Francisco a year afterwards and many times walked the streets in search for something that “called” to me, that “spoke”. Something that fulfilled the emptiness.

The two agents of relief I found were these: The weekly Friends Meeting and the San Francisco Public Library. The Friends Meeting was held in an unassuming building in the Mission (I think) and was filled every Sunday with professionals of every stripe on the padded chairs that we later folded up to make way for the noontime potluck. I never stayed for the social. I cried through every meeting. I never introduced myself. And I never was moved enough to speak. But I sat in the stillness and felt. At meeting, I was allowed to feel and felt protected in that space. I felt mostly sadness and despair. And I cried. And when Meeting was over, I shook hands with everyone, gathered my things and left. I remember one man reached out to me and asked me to volunteer a night’s service in the soup kitchen, which I gladly agreed to.

And the SF library, once I found my way around, was the most fantastic wonderful, magical place in the whole universe! Books, upon books. Hundreds of people reading books and looking for books. And here is where I found the authors I never knew I was looking for: Kerouac, Baldwin, Hurston, among many others. I lived at the library. And every free moment I had was spent riding the bus there so I could walk the floors and look over the balconies onto the patrons below. And discover books.

But running away to a beautiful and carefree city like San Francisco was still running away. And so here I am back in Vermont, not “talking about it”, not knowing how.

After my rapid spin into grief last February and my lack of composure at the bereaved parents meeting the following month, I resolved to be more aggressive in my “coming out”. It’s what I wanted all this time really, to have my experience as a mother validated in some way. I have no other children and am still fairly youthful looking. And most people assume that I have never had children, that I am not a mother, much less a mother of a dead child. But I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m tired of hiding a fact that is so integral to who I am. Perhaps in a future post I will tell you how I could never be the wonderfully contented and happy person that I am, if not for this experience. Later.

I will tell you that this summer, at my last year at the Kundiman Emerging Asian American Poets’ Retreat on the University of Virginia campus, our workshop with Staceyann Chin took a turn towards the tightly held secrets of our past. She asked us, in regards to our families, what we were really grateful for, and what we is our most painful relationship and why. She required that we skirt the excuses and apologies and tell the heart of it.

So there I was, in this maroon carpeted room crying onto the conference table. Telling my fellow poets that I didn’t want sympathy. That I simply wanted to honor Akira by no longer being shy about her birth or her death. And this was my greatest sorrow. Not knowing how to do it.

I read a poem at our last salon about Akira. Something I wrote in that afternoon, as an exercise to illustrate a new form that my friends and I invented—the freeTouplet. Somehow, admitting it to a roomful of peers was a first small step in building her into my history. Here’s the first draft, below (unformatted, since I do not know how to do that on the blog ).

Phaylynn Akira Luekhamhan 1996
You are nine days. A shadow on the moon. You are swaddled. Buried. Swallowed. My sandwich meat. Scalpeled. Baby, you are engineer of my grief. You, shadow on the far side of my belief.
Say it.
Dead. You are dead. Dead.
You refuse.
Alive as fire,
you are bed.
You are coal.
You began, begun
My undoing
I am
Instead
Of without
I am
Intent
I am
Instead
Of collapsed
Revived

You my bedside.

My advocate.

Reader daughter.

Become my risk.

My give/take.

little gypsy

my reel

I bought a menorah. It’s a gleaming petite silver bridge of small cups, and this one is devoid of the Star of David, a dreidel, Hebrew glyphs, or anything else “Jewish” about it—discounting the thing itself. And this is not a celebration of light, but rather a different kind of struggle. This is why I’m lighting my first candle today.

Once, a long time ago, I was

In my youth, naïveté, I got pregnant when I was 20, with

I keep finding it hard to write it and keep I t one the page. I got pregnant. I had a baby. We named her Akira. She’s dead now. 14 years ago. I keep crossing and uncrossing these words. Writing and rewriting them. This is my big secret that I want to share. But even the words, as I write them. They don’t seem enough. Or right. They I feel trapped by them. Or I don’t want to let them out. Come back to haunt me or make me remember.

But I am a writer. And words are my tools, but they are such blunt and dull and inappropriate instruments today.

Back to the menorah. And this Vigil for Akira. The need to commemorate. Need? Commemorate? I feel that I

Last year, was a at this time, I was running a grief marathon, thirteen years after Akira’s death. It was early February and I had felt walked around was going about my days with a dissociative feeling that I’d forgotten something. What was it? Keys? Wallet? Important meeting? I was doing something mundane—folding the laundry, let’s say—when I felt an immense sadness fall on top of me. Stunned, and hardly breathing, my tears came on hot and steadily. I wailed.

How could I have forgotten that my baby’s birthday? The day The hours I spent in the hospital faded blue room, meditating through my contractions, walking the wide halls in my robe and johnny. I’d forgotten? I’d forgotten how it snowed that night and how the falling flakes glittered in the yellow halos of street lamps outside my window. I’d forgotten that Erik, Papa-to-be, sat came and went from the room, as much as his comfort would allow. I’d forgotten that.

The forgetting is not usually hard. Most Februarys, I am Akira’s birth and death anniversaries come and go as easily as blinking dreaming, sometimes a chore, but not usually. And I , the echoes of which haunt but do not control my waking life. The nine days when I was a mother to Akira and I were in the same world together seem like another lifetime away. I was a different person then. I’ve got a good and happy life without her. I’m moving on. I am more than this death.

So why last year did it hit me so hard? I checked the calendar during the initial crying spell. Akira would have been 13 years old that day. The hardest thing about remembering my dead child’s birthday is that it will always be joined with remembering her death day. Can’t have one without the other.

Dan came home from work and found me in an emotional mess. When I cry, I go all out hurricane mode: snot, tears, wet cheeks, soaking shirt. Uncontrollable. I had probably abandoned the wash and curled into a little ball on the futon, until he came home, after which I felt better, but far from normal.

I’d forgotten it—the mess of tubing and electrode wire that had connected her to the machines behind her. The days of blipping oxygen machines and green monitors. The gentle-speaking nurses on their rounds. Who can forget the city-within-a-city feeling of Dartmouth’s Medical Center, and that I walked so hard every day up and down those stairs that I, in a moment of weakness, used the elevator to the third floor of David’s House, to the room we lived out of? I have not forgotten I’ve forgotten the green and cream striped wallpaper and the wing chair and the canopied bed. I’d forgotten until then that I rocked her solid and stiff body in the nursery, after we’d disconnected her. That the light was yellow and dim. I remember that the Doctor cried as he told me the news. And that I The blonde nurse who was tending Akira once reminded me to eat and gave me her package of peanut butter and crackers and I’ve forgotten how it feels to force yourself to swallow. It’s okay that I’d forgotten the ugly parts, rights? I don’t want to continually remember this. But I do. I don’t. But I do.

And so I bought the menorah

The next day after my complete and utter breakdown, I went to work in an unusually fragile state. I considered telling my co-worker, a mother herself, what was going on. Actually, I’d wanted to tell her for a long time, but never found a way to slip it into conversation, nor the courage. But I knew she would understand and feel for me. I could trust her with my feelings. But whenever I’m faced with coming out as a bereaved parent, I always chicken out. I did that day too. I put on my best, most cheerful smile and greeted the customers as best I could. I handed them their coffees and their change. I tried to act normal. I felt like a fake. And I took frequent bathroom breaks to collect myself, and to give the tears the privacy they deserved.

I got through the day without incident and trudged home to cry without interruption. Dan, once home from the office, calmed my nerves and offered himself up to my abuse and amusement. I mean that in all goodness. I cry on his shoulder and vent about what’s bothering me. And he, in his own sweet way, brings me out of the cloud of despair with his humor and gentleness.

I didn’t know Dan when Akira was born. I wouldn’t know him for another seven years. Because, frankly, it took me that long to pull myself out of grief enough to join in with the regular world again. Start joining clubs and taking classes. Make friends and date again. I couldn’t have asked for anyone as kind and forgiving as he. And in my 14th year of bereavement, and he takes my sorrow and spins it into sunshine.

Erik, the My baby’s father and I broke up. Usual story. Though it wasn’t because of Akira. We had been on and off and we’d both decided it was better to call it quits—before we knew we were pregnant. He’s grown up in a broken home, and mine as actively breaking. We decided to stick together for the baby’s sake, and rented an apartment and made a stab at giving our kid the normal upbringing that neither of us had. We probably stayed together for about another month after she passed. Both of us grieved in our own way, separately, and didn’t know how to support one another.

I moved out to my own apartment and have been on my own ever since, until I started dating again.

As much as I write, I don’t know that it will all get said. This is just a little bit—an introduction. My plan is to light a candle for every day she took a breath (assisted or not), during her anniversary dates. So if this series of posts seems a little like too much information for you, please check back in after Valentine’s Day, when I’ll have moved on with myself. But for those of you who are reading, please know that this is all a part of my healing process. And that I am writing right now because I can’t tell you directly. This is the truth. I simply can’t talk about it. So if you’re reading and would like to acknowledge it in some way, please simply say “I’m reading your Vigil for Akira. Thanks (please keep writing, etc.)” or something like that. Make it short. Because I can really only handle a small cursory glance over the whole subject. Any more than that would be too much. But you do not have to acknowledge or respond. I am doing this for my own sake. If you’d like to pass along this blog post and share it, I’d fine with that too. I think it’s a necessary part of my “coming out”.

Just to make a long blog post a little longer, here’s a little poem I wrote during a writing generation workshop with Jan Frazier, to whom I am greatly indebted. I’d attended a month-long poetry retreat at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT in 2004 and presented this along with some other poems for a manuscript critique with Richard Jackson. He said this was the strongest poem of the bunch. It’s not changed much and was published by bakkamagazine.com in April 2008. I wrote it for my friend Vada, who was bedside with me for some of the worst times.

ICU

my fingers clutched
in futility the flesh
we cursed the blood
that would not flow there
your toes the size
of dime-store pearls
were fat with fluid
and black as the night
I birthed you
we talked I recall
of everyday things—
as if you were already
barefoot on the porch
brushing a doll and
I was squat shelling peas

About Workshop Poems: These are drafts I’m revising. One a month. Please feel free to comment. And check back in throughout the month to see how I’ve progressed with it.

January 2010 original:

Brother(s)

We had our separate twin beds, sharing the room
with purple plush bears and the thundering monsters
we named from under our covers at night.
With satisfied stomachs of rice, my voice carried the both of us
into scarlet, clovered dreaming.

( I did not know)

Through our window, the dual aroma of lilac and mint slippered in
as firebugs fall down, petite stars
gilding the dusk of our game, between blue pine
and heaven, between
(I give up) and ollie oxen.

(what have we got to get her?)(we got a name.)

Yet I knew. The cinema’s flickering told it this way:
hearts will cleave in half (or thirds),
portions of which are no longer ours to hold.
I knew it this way: teddy bears grow up, fall apart.
The tales you asked from me ended like this: Together.

(we determine the inkblot’s fold)

Namesharing, our last halves equal (beginning the same).
I hurled my books at you and still you broke no ribs.
I abandoned you to the streets, yet homeward still.
Still. Homeward still. Still, my heart
is cleaving.

Working revision copy:

Brother(s)

We had our separate twin beds, sharing the room
with purple plush bears and the thundering monsters
we named from under our covers at night.
With satisfied stomachs of rice, my voice carried the both of us
into scarlet, clovered dreaming.

( I did not know)

Through our window, the dual aroma of lilac and mint slippered in
as firebugs fall fell down, petite stars
gildinggilded the dusk of our game, between blue pine
and heaven, between
(I give up) and ollie oxen.

(what have we got to get her?)(we got a name.)

Yet I knew. The cinema’s flickering told it this way:
hearts will cleave in half (or thirds),
portions of which are no longer ours to hold.
I knew it this way: teddy bears grow up, fall apart.
The tales you asked from me ended like this: Together.

(we determine the inkblot’s fold)

Namesharing, our last halves equal (beginning the same).
I hurled my books at you and still you broke no ribs.
I abandoned you to the streets, yet homeward still.
Still. Homeward still. Still, my heart
is cleaving.

New Version:

[check back later]

girl on the platform meditating

Seems like ages ago that I wrote this poem, and just as long that Jennifer Karmin put it into action as part of her “Walking Poems” project in Chicago.  It’s recently published on How2.  Check it out.

I know I’ve grown so much as a poet since the writing and submission of this poem, but it still retains sentimental value for me.  I wrote during my brief little tour of New York City in January of 2006.  A country girl from Vermont in the big City for a weekend, I sent short emails home to my friends of my first impressions:

Finally got a taste of a real chocolate souflee, which I'd been dreaming 
about since the dessert party this summer, where it was noticably absent 
from the menu...found myself in an apartment with two guys playing Go, and a 
woman about to leave for Bejing early the next morning.

the smell of take out lingering in elevator carriages, the sounds of 
unidentifiable languages, people so familiar yet not my own. I could walk a 
long time down these hard gray streets before I needed rest. Bent pizza 
boxes, posters weathering off the walls, jewel-colored lamp shades in the 
park, the ghost of myself in the windows I walk past. So much tactile 
sensory information.

I had taken the trip to New York to read at a Kundiman-sponsored event at Verlaine.  I stayed with another Kundiman fellow, Rona Luo.  I had drinks at the Telephone Bar, where fellow Kundis were reading.  We went to Chinatown for dinner and ice creams.

I was broke and dreamy-eyed.  I had been practicing daily meditations on gratitude and love.  And as I waited for the train, I closed my eyes…

Slept in, per Rona's suggestion. Squatted on the station platform and 
meditated in the sun. Gorgeous no jacket day. Perused bookshops, killing 
time before lunch. Mongolian pepper steak, halo halo, Thai iced tea, gossip 
and poetry shop talk with one of the most beautiful women I know.What do I 
want? Someone who is comfortable in his body, and who can cherish mine. We 
ate next to fish the size of my head in their blue tank.

Oh, how young and dreamy I was then.  And in love with every new experience!

The luggage is in the car, trunk packed
with boxes and bags like building blocks,
as if leaving was just another game,
this turn toward the open road.
If we were in first grade and this was “house,”
I would be departing for work, you
the library. And after the long recess
apart, we’d meet lips chastely, having the promise
of our whole lives together
to get it right. If this were play,
I’d say to you, kiss the kids for me–I’ll be late,
again. I’d disappear around the bookcase,
hide in my pretend office, distract myself
with colorful picture books, dial a toy phone
to my secretary and look out the window at the rain, the birds.
If I hadn’t forgotten, I’d return to you
whom I hardly know, and you’d be there
on the flowered rug in your socks, reconstructing
the wooden pieces we’d built together, adding rooms.
In practice, we never fought–my words never bore knives
or chased you. I never sat at bars unraveling myself
to strangers, to women who defied lovely. You never sulked
in a nightshirt, overspent. You never smacked
a swath of your child’s skin, made it burn.
If we’d have understood the purpose
of a door, the reasons we return to open it,
the step into devotion, my car would not steer away.
You would not stand so tall, my final backward glance.

a mountain grew out of the shapeless river
we drank the birds like madness
their feathers all manner of chalk
we scribbled those dreams
the shadows of them on our backs
branded ourselves with our made-up
dead languages we had no names for
the months fermented, slid
down our throats bitter, salted
we walked miles of purple
to where our feet could never take us
our words flew like hungry spear, crackled
in the mute slideshow of lightening bugs
we crowned each other holy
wrote wreaths of columbine and clover
rolled into morning the honey
marrow of living with blank paper hearts

in the Meadows, they dipped their bony heads
to the grass and pulled them by roots
into their warm pink mouths

they were black and white and they mooed
an inconsistent chorus and they spilled
from under the red eaves, lazy sun bathers

the herd in their stanchions milked
by hands that had also thrown hay
and smoothed their high splotched hides

they were black and white and they moved
like slow drunks in search of a seat
they huddled in dots along the Meadows

and they steamed in the evening chill
where they would still spot the fields
had the trucks not come to empty the farm

The Commons, February 2007