Throwback Thursday: 3 poems by Kevin Phan

Throwback Thursday is a monthly series that re-visits work originally published in [PANK] Magazine. 

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Wow! 2019 was a wild ride. I had a beautiful time. Camping under the stars. Firing off submissions to literary journals. Trying out new recipes. Working myself like a dog. And winning the Mountain West Poetry Series. (Shameless plug.) My first full-length collection will be out in the Fall of 2020.

I also had a wonderful time reading your work, too, dear reader. I spending countless nights browsing literary journals, falling in love with language over & over. For its richness. For its compactness. For its tautness. For the ways that it luxuriates on the page. For all it says & the things it withholds. So many of the capabilities have felt negative.

I’ve also been listening to classical music to pass the time. Yesterday, I attended a live performance of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto no. 3, performed by the Colorado Symphony with Brett Mitchell at the conducting helm, & all I can say is that I left with my heart full of dark water. A bittersweet chocolate you can live inside. Also, I’ve been reworking my way through Mahler’s symphonies chronologically, one-by-one. And what a treat it’s been. Yet the most soul-satisfying experience I’ve had in recent memory has been listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3, where Portishead’s Beth Gibbons sings the operatic parts. Sinking inside her trill lush hauntings has been a highlight of my winter.

While being published in PANK was a wonderful experience, I never heard from you, dear reader. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want to reach out to shoot the shit about language, poems, recipes, travel stories, or to grab a beer if you’re ever in the mountain west. (Colorado, to be specific.) kevinaphan@gmail.com.

–Kevin Phan

[Kombucha & skincare]

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Kombucha & skincare. Ointment & rice paper. Oil changes, jasmine dreams, sun salutations. I pray alone. For everyone. It floats up & through my living kitchen. This need to smooth in. Feelings, big as barns, gliding toward the sun. Lost in bright confusions, bone cancer at the center–she loved us once. Does god care for shipwrecked vessels, tending to the sick as their bodies, one-by-one, disintegrate beyond trembles? A feel good comedy, except some people, or flesh approaching compost. & In the book of Now, world’s gone wild.  “May all beings reach enlightenment, quickly.” (All the bats of the universe geolocate inside my prison cell.) Precious human birth–life I plan to taste just once–what’s one pure act I’ve done? A lyric running down my godless honey scraps. What a lesson. Something about how hunger swells us close to education. 

[Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel]

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Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel, coloring my words & tongue—Presbyterian, Methodist, Unitarian, Baptist, on & on. May I learn to love again, for the first time. White eternal of my comforter snowing my room–bright flower, bright flower. Gutters, jamming with Fall’s rot leaves. I pledge Allegiance. Mother’s voice keeps calling to me in dreams. Says“in death we’re stronger than ourselves.” (Our Maker, neither punitive nor male.) Morning meditations into universal Love, praying alone for everyone, yet I fail to feed the birds! Eternities’ shadow breeds in my mind, raining a patch on the shed’s rusty nails. We’re overlapping presences. Jade rabbits enter purple heavens. There’s just no cure for that. I want to light every necktie on fire. I want to go slopping ‘round the ocean in a casket, amigo to whales, reeking storms & ancient secrets. 

[Just as time erases kisses from my body]

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Just as time erases kisses from my body. Just as my family bows down to sadness & cancer. & I fall into dreams rehearsing the Dictionary of Distant Angels. & Rise from morning hay, clean as a salt lick, in a field of long division. I pray alone for everyone, recalling the Diamond Sutra. “However many beings there are in whatever realms of being might exist, whether they are born from an egg or born from a womb, born from the water or born from the air, whether they have form or no form, whether they have perception or no perception or neither perception nor no perception, in whatever conceivable realm of being one might conceive of beings, in the realm of complete nirvana, I shall liberate them all. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated.” 

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