They said I drowned,
but the truth is softer:
I laid myself down like an offering.

I spit river into their open mouths.
I bit the lilies in half.

Silk turned cathedral.
I let my dress balloon with river light.

The earth had nowhere else for me.

If you pressed your ear to the surface,
you would have heard me humming.
They didn’t write that part.

When they pulled me out,
I still had violets in my teeth.
I still had the nerve to look alive.

If ruin was the crown they gave me,
I wore it dripping.
I wore it bright.

You think you know the story:
girl, river, grief.

But the water was warm that day.
The sky was a soft ache.
I was tired of carrying everyone else’s ending.

So I wrote my own.

Not drowned.
Not tragic.
Not accepting their ending.

In Đà Nẵng my friends cradled me like a child.
We screamed Taylor bridges,
tequila-toasted in bars until the lights blurred.
A single candle in the bathroom
danced warm sighs through open windows,
and all felt calm.

I grew new muscles balancing on a motorcycle,
sometimes gripping Harry’s jacket,
sometimes throwing my weight into the wind.
The city flared neon and gasoline in stuttered traffic,
but along the coast
he drove so fast the vibrations in my chest harmonized.
I pictured my bones becoming butterflies if I let go.

Last year I entered the year of the dragon on a futon,
swayed to sleep by a hundred chanting voices from the temple next door
while Bailey burned incense for her ancestors below.
I did not dream of dragons.
I only learned to breathe fire.

The year of the snake slid in with new bones and old habits.
It hissed that suffering could be scripture
until letters slithered free from the page
and coiled like cold jewelry around my wrist.

That was the shedding.
Salt water peeling old skin away,
songs shouted so loud they drowned the ache,
poems that did not start tragic,
nights when my body finally kept time with the moon.

Then at home the dog’s teeth found my hope.
A terrified mouth rerouted rivers
through my soft parts.
A jewel carved from my nose.
Six punctures blooming across my arms like altars.

In Vietnamese stories the snake waits beneath the water
to claim whoever dares the bank.
I wonder if I was chosen the moment
I opened my mouth in those bars,
when I leaned into the bike’s curve
as if danger could be a love song.

Now I lie awake at hours unnamed,
tracing scars that hiss answers back.
Vietnam hums inside me still,
the candle, the coast, the chorus of friends,
but I cannot tell if they are memories
or if the snake is still awake inside me.

They say snakes shed to grow,
but no one warns you how thin the new skin feels,
how everything burns against it,
how you mistake survival for prophecy.

I touch the scar and wonder
if I am still that girl clinging to the bike,
or if the snake has already swallowed me,
patient, sleepless,
feeding on my own venom.

I wasn’t holy,
but I wore rings like relics,
my hands glowing with faint outlines
as if someone bit away the gold.

I smoked cloves behind the theater
like I was auditioning for my own myth,
my knees pressed into asphalt prayers,
asking God for a role bigger than
girl storing apocalypse in composition notebooks.

Every boy was a borrowed psalm,
every kiss a hymn half-remembered.
I prayed by spilling myself on sidewalks,
by getting too loud in stairwells,
by falling down and calling it confession.

When they said, be careful,
I heard, be catastrophic.
When they said, be real,
I heard, be ruinous.
When they said, play nice,
I heard, play God.
When they said, repent,
I heard, revolt.

So I tried.
And every bruise became scripture
when the spotlight hit wrong.
And every scar became testimony
when no one believed me.
And every silence turned gospel
because scripture doesn’t stay quiet either.

Last night I dreamed
I was holding the world again.
Not the globe from elementary school,
the real thing,
with oceans sloshing against my collarbone
and earthquakes chewing up my wrists.

The therapist asked,
“Does it feel heavy?”
and I laughed,
because no one ever asks Atlas
if he’s tired.

Somewhere,
you were packing a suitcase
with the same precision
you once used on my heart.
Fold, tuck, close.
Disaster, neatly zipped.

I told the therapist
I wanted to set the world down,
but I was afraid
it would roll off the table
and break something important.
Like your posh espresso machine,
my mother’s knees,
the sky.

So instead I balance it,
smiling like it doesn’t ache,
the way women carry grocery bags
or families carry secrets:
both arms shaking,
waiting for something to finally drop,
pretending they didn’t hear it shatter.
Everyone insisting it’s just the weather.

I open the window at 2 a.m.
and the air tastes like my grandmother’s restlessness,
lavender and Snapple Peach Iced Tea and
the coarse salt on the counter I’d sneak under
my tongue with a finger perfumed from magazines.

I don’t know if the sirens outside
are chasing someone
or warning us of heat again.
Every July feels like it’s bruising forward,
like the earth has a fever,
I keep pressing my palm to her forehead,
are you okay?
will you be okay?

Once, love was tomatoes ripening on a vine.
Now it’s the absence of rain,
a mirage crawling on its hands and knees,
a silence fattened into cruelty,
a river shrinking in a photograph
I can’t delete.

My body remembers
every humid afternoon,
swollen sky pregnant with nothing,
gasoline rainbow choking in the gutter,
texts I let rot in the blue light,
every ancestor who walked into smoke.

I want to believe the light is still holy,
but it smells like her kitchen burning.
Last night I dreamed of sparrows
falling mid-flight,
their wings charred into silence.
The cardinals keep coming,
arterial across the branches,
each one a flare gun aimed at the future.

And I woke laughing
not because it was funny,
but because irony
was the last mouth left open.

The Life of a Showgirl

Glitter is just dust
that learned to beg for attention.

The crowd loves the fire,
not the girl breathing the smoke.

I’ve bled in gowns worth more than rent.
Showgirls don’t sleep,
we just step out of view.

I bow so low the room flips upside down
and think about staying there.

The house always wins when the house is me.
Every encore’s just a prettier cage.

Applause is hunger wearing perfume.
I’ve been feeding it my spine for years.

Every standing ovation is an autopsy report—
cause of death: she was too good at her job.

I learned to stand still
so the aim would be easier.
The dress is breathtaking,
and I can’t breathe.

The pearls bruise softer in summer.
By fall, they know my throat’s shape.
By winter,
I forget I can take them off.

The life of a showgirl
is knowing the curtain call
and the execution order
sound exactly the same.

And I bow
until the curtain closes,
and I’m gone-
even I’m not sure
where I go.

He called me His daughter.
I told Him if that were true,
then I have inherited His worst appetite

His plague-hand,
His taste for undoing,
His flood-mouth.

I no longer kneel on oakwood,
I dictate in my sleep like a tyrant.
I issue stone-chiseled ultimatums
and twist sheets like intestines,
jaw locked around the name
I refuse to pray.

I wake with my teeth clenched,
my hands full of hair
I do not remember pulling,
as if I am cracking
the necks of angels,
tearing halos apart.

When you call your flock home
I will stand on the altar
in my softest dress,
still stiff with holy water,
and the smell of
my childhood prayers.

I will meet Your eyes,
to ask what it feels like
to create something
you taught to hate yourself back

I will not wait for your answer.