JOSHUA NGUYEN, FEATURED IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
My Mother Explains Universal Healthcare
The bird gives a feather to the sky, like all the other birds do.
The bird doesn’t get angry about giving a feather,
the bird has many feathers to pluck.
From afar, it still looks like a bird.
One feather a month is for the health of all birds:
bluejays, cardinals, pigeons, hummingbirds, penguins,
& flamingos.
When a bird hops on one leg,
someone will nurse it back to health
& the bird doesn’t pay a feather
The bird flies on because it should, because it deserves
a chance to live.
The bird flows gorgeous with the wind;
the wind shows spots where the bird plucked itself.
You are not a bird,
you are not allowed to fly.
Notes on “My Mother Explains Universal Healthcare”
I wanted the speaker of the poem to enact a storytelling voice when explaining a very adult thing to their child. I loved the juxtaposition of “Universal Healthcare” and its dryness, with the extended imagery of the birds in the body of the poem. Even within the body of the poem, we get the juxtaposition of long lines within the first 80% of the poem before the speaker takes a hard volta with the last enjambed couplet. Some people read the nuisance of the speaker, that even while explaining the harshness of reality, it is done with love.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a queer Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He has also been featured on both the VS podcast and The Slowdown. He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He is a PhD student at The University of Mississippi, where he also received his MFA. Read more at https://www.joshua-nguyen.com/
Joshua Nguyen, “My Mother Explains Universal Healthcare” from Come Clean. Copyright © 2021 by Joshua Nguyen. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press, www.uwpress.wisc.edu