Self-Portrait in the Weeks After
by Eric Tran

When DA called, I curled up
              like a hand over the receiver.

              Went wet like a worn wheel
rolling slow through a puddle

despite running late. A flame
burned for light in a blackout

              but still cradled at the wick.
              Held like that it only fights

              the dark enough to reveal
              your own face. Tender

as the bruise above my lip.
I kissed my beloved sideways 

until the blood left me alone.
Now a man I’ve never met

without the room spinning
               asks how long I want my assailant

               locked away. A sentence, how
              did we arrive there? In a poem

               I put a sentence to work
               by breaking it again and again.

               But in life, if there’s one
outside poetry, I wince

when snapping a tongue
depressor. I’ve pressed charges

and I once tried to learn pressing
leaves but they rained into rot.

Now what do I do with all
the flowers I’ve stopped cutting?

             My beloved says we can leave them
             to wilt and seed. That’s what they want,

             he maybe says. I worry for them
             like that will keep the frost away.

             What do I want? To wake
             like the morning sun. I can be
             shadow the rest of the day.
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 Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke (Diode Editions, forthcoming 2022) and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer (Autumn House Press). He serves as poetry editor for Orison Press and a poetry reader for the Los Angeles Review.   He has received awards and recognition from Prairie Schooner, New Delta Review, Best of the Net, and others. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere. He is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC.