Three Poems
Jade Hidle
Made in the Family Bed
The family bed,
You are taught,
Is part of your culture,
Of poverty and closeness.
Viet Nam stories of your mother
And uncles lying
Along your bà ngoại’s arms stretched across the bed as pillows,
Their tender heads perched
Like birds on branches.
Maybe this is why,
In America, you forgive
“Sleeping” beside a stranger
In the bed you and your mother share,
Pretending not to hear and feel
The heavy breaths and arhythmic thrusts
Toward making a new family.
Maybe this is when
My body is made
To never fully relax on a pillow,
Instead hovering and ready.
This is why,
In that new family that makes you
Little siblings, you are already awake
When your mother makes midnight
Confessions to you that feel like threats–
“If I die,
all my children
should die with me.”
That was why
You, eldest daughter,
Made an American family bed–
The slumber parties–
For your siblings
In your Vietnamese, not Viet Nam,
House, not home.
Together, safer,
In beds made on the floor, You told bedtime stories of Lord of the Rings
Characters in love over second breakfasts and
Reenactments with paper towel roll swords,
And chapters of A Series of Unfortunate Events
Read in accents but not the one you grew up with–
All crescendoing in your siblings’ laughs
That kept away her shuffling slippers and shadows
Shifting around the house from midnight to first chirps of slow dawn
Until
Some morning
Your mother broke
You from the tight eggroll
Slumber party. While your eyes
Are still blurry from sleep
She castigates you
For your ingratitude,
Her sacrifices,
All for you to sleep
Together
On the floor
As if in Viet Nam
With no choice
No rooms
Of your own,
Robbing her
Of sleep
With
Your
Laughter,
Stupid games,
Books
She didn’t have,
She’ll repeat,
She didn’t have.
The family bed,
Made and unmade,
With siblings whose flight and silence
Is distance you’ll understand
But will break you anyway.
You’ll crave dormitory bunks Of group homes–teenage maternity wards,
Orphanages, asylum Girl, Interrupted-type
Stranger-warmth where chaos is closeness,
Noise is safety, and you are made
By what you will
And won’t
Be
Strawberry Ghazal
The beginning of the year, suddenly, is the clapboard stand built to sell spring’s strawberries. Her face–strong boned and delicately made up–smiles, speaks to the healing of strawberries. Every year, she calls our children her babies and feeds them, wishes “God bless you, mijas.” Even though the world killed my belief, I repeat her prayers because survival is strawberries. This year, she packs palettes of fruit in her car and lets the air conditioning run; the farmworkers Are gone, fields emptied by fear, and now her papers are tucked between boxes of strawberries. Today, I drove past her stand, but it was not open yet. She was not there. Sirens scatter birds From a telephone wire, but they keep formation. I worry her face is, too, fragile like strawberries, Like my uncle–hard from war but soft-cheeked, if not doughy–in the picture on his “Illegal Alien” card, features that we didn’t know where they came from, if his father’s fields grew strawberries. Every new word called out for more questions, just as every wailing siren has me swiveling, Wondering if she’s okay, where we come from, if our seeds were scattered by birds, berries.
Sieve
I find
My thumb
Clicking and scrolling
Onto a man
Digging and sifting
Through rubble
And things pulverized.
He is
Searching and praying
For his wife and baby–
“Only 3 days old”--
And finding
Only a bone
And finding
A chunk, a shard, a thing pulverized
That might have been
Bone, only 3 days old,
But looks more ancient,
As dust does
Sprinkling from his sieve
Meant for flour
To make and feed and grow.
What and why
For him and her
And me and it–
The filter.
The way dust blows
Until you can’t see
It anymore.
Only the wind.
Jade Hidle is a Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian writer and educator. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her travel chapbook, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and Hair: A Lai Mỹ Memoir was released by Texas Tech University Press in 2025. Her work has also appeared in Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, Craft Literary, among other journals. She was also a featured writer on the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org. You can follow her work at www.jadehidle.com or on Instagram @jade_hai_do.
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