Khai Q. Nguyen

What’s left of our days

is the sun that bristles
to my squinting eyes
I travel through
smell of coffee
petrichor of tropical forests
wet and warm like
droplets trickling
down
your thighs
from previous nights
your voice, crisp and turquoise
your camembert breaths marinated
with Virginia cigarettes
garlic bread, sticky rice
agave, and scrambled eggs
your sour sweat and
musky eau de toilette
as reference
on calabash’s vines a ladybird opens
her elytra and flies
sitting there, I stitch
incinerated days into my palms
while a cacophony of
noises shimmering
alive in my ears

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Khai Q. Nguyen lives and writes in the northern mountains of Vietnam. His poems appear in CounterPunch, Eunoia Review, In Parentheses, Mekong Review, New Note Poetry, Porch LitMag, and the anthology Suitcase of Chrysanthemums (great weather for MEDIA, 2018). He holds master’s degrees in literature and cultural studies from the universities of Perpignan, St Andrews, and Santiago de Compostela.