He, Me, Ours

By Maung Htike Aung

He stands on the cliff of humid nights,
fists tight as if holding the last carnival
in a world full of wounds.
There is always a thing in nothing— 
you just don’t pay attention to language,
or it is simply good at deceiving its creators
as we’ve tricked ours many times.
One lip praying, the other wishing.
The man moves in the deep of the night,
staring at the blood pooled in the streets,
the kind you saw on the news one early spring.
His hand reaches mine as we bend to pick up fallen hair
from the bathroom floor.

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Birthday

By Maung Htike Aung

At the door sit a postcard and birthday cake. A cherry atop.
Atop a bamboo fence, a head drenched in blood.
It is surely something that you can’t catch goldfish.
Can’t buy a clock at a secondhand shop.
October always gives mice a piece of cake and a lie.
This too shall pass. We’ll get over it.
Getting over that getting over.
Thirty cakes doesn’t erase the head in a head.
All erased is how to sow a sunny day.
The cake says there’d be goldfish in the sky,
the greenery fields, farmers, their children— 
all bunkers gone. Birthday, rebirth.
I told you October always fools the cake.

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Lullaby

By Maung Htike Aung

​It is drone o’clock.
On a groaning riverbank, the sun is hung alone,
houses laid on the ground, home trodden down
by the devil in his best time.
Home-cooked means something.
Pigeons forget it, their pilgrims forgiving them.
Feeding wounds, fouling socks, fooling faith,
the filthy air flatters its winds,
bold and insolent like a stray dog.
Astride a blind pavement, a busker
and his ill mandolin whine, whine:
Dear Lady Rose of that big nepo boy.
Art can be ass at any time.
Behind closed doors fat hands
conjure the vulture's hum. My hometown
is a boomer is a suicide-bomber.
If you are up that late, the humming wind
will lull you and tormented nights. 

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​Maung Htike Aung is a Burma-based poet, literary translator and educator. His poems and translations are forthcoming and have appeared in Portside Review, Wasafiri, Volume Poetry, The /tƐmz/ Review, Mekong Review, Consequence Forum, Prudence Dispatch, and SUSPECT.