BUZKASHI

with debt to Mark Levine

 

A brother fastens his helmet. His son does the same.

He who has fifty horses backs no one

but a son, a warlord says from his warm compound

where the warlord is running for vice president.

Time is incestuous this way.

1979: the Soviets shot each hoof, every head. Death

saw no danger in being nude. Then the Taliban:

they allowed the game, but rode the mares in summer

until they rode no more. She who is not consoled

lasts longer than the fever of a horse

whose teeth flare out in prayer, Khyber blade

in the crosshatch hands of her rider, hands from a life

of whipping. Whose blood is on the ground is she

whose god is a wrestler who trains

beneath the rising moon whose rider scythes the harvest.

A horse can nudge a man with her chest,

come down without bending her knees. She knows what he wants

she knows what he wants her to do.

​

AS FOR THE CORPSES, NO DOOR

 

Pale girl, fat carcass; boy uncut, unhooved.

The combination of girl and boy

in flowering desert. Girl and boy in flood,

brackish water. For the sake of children. Her brain

like cauliflower, cheesecake in dark rooms;

girl and boy: conscience between two mothers.

The upper half of body, the lower depth of honey,

rough beast, dark brass—burnt tokens from home,

remnants, chrysanthemums in a gale. Their olio of limbs.

Here then, new habitat: his forehead

in early sunlight where cold scarlet

and opaline mind, her cilia her sinew, mole underfoot.

Here then, her false-thorned earrings and sycamore skins,

wind white with petals wild from a week alone.

Alone, undone—like a father and a feather whose forecast:

breath, oil, fossil. Pharmakon: a cure as well as a poison.

In open grave, her hands deep in the pockets of.

The voice of a crane.

​​​

-from Root Fractures

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A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller Institute ICA and selected for the Silver Falls Film Festival. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and winner of the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.