by pines linger
Cato
Zilpha
voice afire
these woods remember
her house
bones, bricks amid oak copse
Brister
my epitaph
a discolored fortune
Fenda
Black children rose before
roots wild
at the edge of myth
//
let well tempered men
salute
poetry without spark
witness in dark
the heir in his cellar
muttering
of river meadows
art, occupied—
a broken Spring
now scatter beggar-ticks
thimble-berries
sweet-scented waves and tearless grass
over fox burrows
musing
new-rising story
that first mark
tender
//
privilege lulled
a settler
no master
could keep this land
of visions
smitten heathen I was
literate traveller
nothing can deter
a poet
the freeborn
sky cannot
—
Erasure of the chapter “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors” from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859)
Mai-Linh Hong
Mai-Linh Hong is a Vietnamese American refugee poet and literary scholar. Her debut poetry collection, Continental Drift, won the 2025 Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. Poems appear or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Waxwing, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She is a VONA Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and Susana Colloredo Fellow in Environmental Writing at the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at the University of California, Merced.
