The white woman rather thin with a cinched
vintage coat who I met and later referred to as ‘Pill Box’
(saying ‘I call her Pill Box’)
January it was night
in a warehouse space after an evening
of poetry performances
A small warm
setting very cold winter (think black, red, and white)
Table set with antlers & roasted marrow
She loud-laughing earlier at a poem
about Vietnamese people or
I thought so and even asked about the joke
(Did you get that on the ‘inside’? I had said)
but she being Pill Box
said nothing and later
shared a Bic lighter by tossing it
at me—or toward me
(But note not simply ‘chucking’ it either
more like a side-wrist slinging)
You could say she ‘slung’ or ‘slanged’ it
(the small plastic lighter) with velocity
or maybe I could say simply ‘she threw it’
as in definitely
at me directly as earlier she had thrown
her pill box hat
in my general direction
though my poetry girlfriend
caught the hat in her lap
About the lighter Pill Box cackled
(actually more like a smothered chortle)
She said ‘Made by Dow’
That’s it: ‘Made by Dow’
She linking the Bic to the poem
and the line where she got it
from my reference to napalm
in the napalm poem
(“made by Dow Chemical”
said the poem)
and so it was maybe this or the other I don’t know
which provoked the thing her narrow laugh and throwing
the made-by-Dow lighter at me to say
‘Made by Dow’
‘Made by Dow’
I since have come to say ‘Made by Dow’
and tell the Pill Box story
Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen lives in Toronto. From Wave Books, her poetry collections include As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice: Poems 1998-2008, and Violet Energy Ingots, nominated for a 2017 Griffin Prize for poetry. She teaches poetics at Ryerson University, for Miami University’s low residency MFA program, for the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and in a long-running, private workshop.