Poem-a-Day - "How To Forgive" by Susan Nguyen

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September 26, 2022 

How To Forgive

Susan Nguyen

She asks me to write a list
of all the names I’ve been called.
And then a list of things
that are killing me.
Where to start? Susie. Sue.
Big Head. Men have called me cold.
Men I know, men I don’t.
It’s all over the news
how they want to kill me.
It doesn’t matter what they
call me. When I was 17, I kneeled
on the stained carpet at Men’s Wearhouse,
looping a tape measure around
a small boy’s waist and he showed me
my name. He pulled his eyes slant
as I measured the distance
between belly button and floor: inseam
or outseam, it’s hard to keep track.
A wedding, his father said.
There was going to be a wedding.
The boy needed a tux.
I don’t like this memory
because I did nothing.
In remembering,
I become nothing again.
Not long after in college,
I was sorting clothes in the back
of a Goodwill. Court-ordered community
service. An older man took
his time looking me up
and down as I sweat through my shirt,
threw pit-stained blouses
into the discard pile,
everything else the salvaging bin.
I went home with him for years,
not knowing about the prior assaults.
Would my knowing have changed
anything? He was gentle
to my face. I only ignored
his texts sometimes.
Men have destroyed me
for less. Even the boy.
I’m supposed to tell you
I forgive him—
he was just a boy.
I forgive myself instead.

Copyright © 2022 by Susan Nguyen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 26, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I went to a manifesto-writing workshop and one of the questions the facilitator asked was ‘Who or what is trying to kill you?’ Years later, in 2021, I came back to this question after hearing news, again and again, about the murders of Asian American women during a time of increased Asian hate and violence. It brought me to some memories that I am ashamed of. With this poem, I hope to release that shame and turn my anger outwards.”
Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen is a Vietnamese American poet and the author of Dear Diaspora (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). The recipient of the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, she serves as the senior editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Dear Diaspora
(University of Nebraska Press, 2021)

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Thanks to Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Hogue’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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