Eric Tran is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC and received his MFA from UNC Wilmington. He won the 2019 Autumn House Press Emerging Writer’s contest and his debut book of poetry, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, will be published in 2020. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review and elsewhere.




Eric Tran

Scenes





does he speak / does he break a fever / when you undress the door / of his throat with clarity / of rain held in both hands / of drought like petals / made silk in the body / of a book does he swallow / silence like blood / dark wine * No dark, just lush, the fullest green and braided leather. Teeth and throatbare. Incisor and instep. Two fists of crushed brocade under your back. Swollen door, fitted, deep thudding. Careless window without a shutter. The china tree in midnight: Arms full of leaves bitten into stars. * It’s easier, my blood outside me Hotter under sunlight Held in a chipped teacup or between your thighs I could take us for roses this way I could tender my hand and see jam on your lips * I’d unshell you in the sun, spill you on the hot baked brick. Stained white with ready. Emptied, right there in God’s open garden. A bed from every swell of dirt, plow each two knuckles deep and two more wide. Make soft the roots and stems. Tremble the boughs naked of leaves. Let the ground grow wet with fruit.


After resisting the movie for so long, I finally watched Call Me By Your Name on a long flight and was so moved I started writing down lines as I cried. And as time went on, I became more and more frustrated by the movie: it wasn’t necessarily about queer people nor were queer people involved in its production. In a lot of ways it wasn’t a queer story at all, and so the rest of the poem comes from trying to reclaim queerness from this narrative.



Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.