Origami War Museum

Speaking no Vietnamese, I enter
the gallery of terror paper.
Fifty-four folds manipulate
the language of war.
Fold
an American mind on the dotted line
in place of a swan; in place of a crane.
Try not to get a papercut.

In the first room, I intrude
on a battle that was never my own.
Paddling through rumors in Mekong Delta,
I hear the mourning sky sip Vietnam rain
and fold
a map missing its ocean.
No one told me where to stand,
No one told me where my ripples would land.

Paper became limbs, then feathers
curled into the air, couldn’t be held:
a newborn narrative valley folded
into my lungs. Try to breathe.

A man with a commanding beard, he
flexed college nouns like stars—to the crease,
he pulled and teased to shape its form
unfold, try again,
fold
failures into your ears diagonally,
“Americans killed 88% babies.
Why are you here?”

In the second room I shuffle to
another gallery dim-lighting the dead
serving liquid-copper air in a star base,
from a single sheet of patterned paper,
they fold
over the wrinkles of a conversation never had
under the empty space of this hot Monday
Peeling back layers of bibles, bombs,
burnt incense from a wishing well,
I do not belong.

Aren’t we all the creases left behind?

Heather Cook is a poet living and working in Buffalo, NY. She is most interested in exploring the ways in which poetry lives off the page. Her work has appeared in East Coast Literary Review, ARTVOICE, NAME Magazine, EskimoPie and other literary journals. When she is not writing, she is dabbling in book art.