Issue 9 • Spring 2004 • Featured Lodestar Writer • Poetry

eight margins

Truong Tran

margin

***

if only it were as simple as that a line on the page in a book as in life in choosing a position to the left or right identity is formed dispelling this myth of the outsider looking in

an edge and the area immediately adjacent to it; a border --

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the question being is this silence self imposed he preferred to sit in the corners of a room away from the center away from where the words would gather

the blank space bordering the written or printed area on a page

***

she would no longer place the accents without knowing the context she insisted on translations regardless of the merits with new found meaning she insisted on questioning how one define other between a mother and a son

a limit in a condition or process, beyond or below which something is no longer possible or acceptable

***

freedom of excess allowing for space she imagined the other naked helpless she desired the other in that precise moment she desired to enter to redefine this notion of the line as it relates to the body

an amount allowed beyond what is needed

***

he said I love you with the awkwardness of a child language discovered for the very first time having imprisoned these words for so long they spilt from his lips like water from a ladle

a measure, quantity, or degree of difference

***

she called today demanding that I return what is rightfully hers her language her stories the sum of her life her sense of self in the eyes of the other to my surprise she was rather sympathetic I told her I was broke to which she replied that she says is the story of my life

the difference between the market value of collateral and the face value of a loan

***

to control the spread of mint in her garden she would have to plant them in milk cartons before planting them in the ground she would bury the faces of missing children deep in soil such was the practice when containing beauty

botany the border of a leaf

Truong Tran received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MFA at San Francisco State University. He is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Arts Council of Santa Clara, the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund and the San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals including ZYZZYVA, The American Voice, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Another Chicago Magazine, and The North Dakota Quarterly. He is the author of three collections of poetry including placing the accents, The Book of Perceptions, and dust and conscience, which recently received the Poetry Center Book Award. Truong is currently living in San Francisco and working as Executive Director for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest Asian Pacific American Arts organization in United States. His poems "because" and "eight margins" are from his book within the margin, due from Apogee Press in 2004.

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