Lam, Kien 2023
Bags of ice drip from the back of a small bike
in Vietnam. The exhaust pipe rumbles. The man
sweats. My tongue melts. We are lucky we are not tiny
starving polar bears slipping off the last refuge
of ice into the black asphalt. The open
ocean. Or I should say we are lucky
the coming flood is incremental.
– Kien Lam, “Almost”
Watch Kien Lam’s 2023 reading with Danni Quintos at the Chicago Poetry Center:
Kien Lam begins at 39:08 minutes.
A hangover is a kind of prayer in which your last drink is the blood of the Lord, which is you, which is not a sustainable method of consumption. A cow can’t drink from its own utter. The body doesn’t move by itself.
– Kien Lam, “Zuihitsu”
Watch Kien Lam perform his poetry:
