Selkie Weaning Young (Redux)

Finding her hide we trailed 
                                    fingers down then against  
             grains of fur thrusting shoulders into its waxy skin. 

                                                                This is how she found us 
                           the past draped about us like a cloak 
hands separating peach halves from a core. 

                                   Her form in the sound 
a pandan leaf peeking through milk. The only seals in Vietnam: 
                                                                     American men with green faces.

Copyright © 2023 by Diana Khoi Nguyen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 17, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“In graduate school, I wrote a version of this poem which served as a grounding myth for the familial, psychological, and emotional content in my work. Eventually, I realized that, while I had learned much about ‘craft,’ my poems were stripped of details from the communities to which I belong; instead my poems reflected the predominately white institutions that educated me. Years later, I stumbled across the old version and removed that which does not speak with verisimilitude to my lived experience. I no longer ‘translate’ away ethnic details when I write, but try to capture these elements with irreplaceable precision.”
—Diana Khoi Nguyen