All in the tone.
Give us each day our diacritics — our low and high, fall and rise, our horns and holds:
Flat we are without.
(You like that, no doubt.)
Give us our dấu sắc, huyền, ngã, hỏi, nặng:
For ours is not your flat euphony
Your squeezed, frictioned speech
But full mouth music:
Tripping of water over stone-carved lingas
Rising tang of early season mango in the mouth
Trill of moonlight and wind on silk curtains or reflected sunlight, prismatic, on rice paddies along the Baie d’Along
Coloratura descant of US bombs
Scintillae of mother’s ivory comb as it falls in the ivory mirror as if through water as if through silk through your long black hair.
Má (high rising) is mother; is also cheek, as in slack of flesh made gaunt, sallow from malnutrition, as in from agent orange, from yellow rain, from grief, as in to which I turn my face. As in turn the other.
Now grave your voice: mà falls to but, fell conjunction breaking what it binds — negating — making negative — glyph fallen away now as ma becomes ghost, as in hungry, as in of your unborn child — my unborn sister — by defoliants consumed — body burden negating body burden — in your corrupted womb.
And devil too, as in turn that famous photo of Hồ Chí Minh’s face upside down to see: a cipher, see, as signed by the tilde in mã. As in we are, all of us, hooked, gaffed, dipped long and held down into the always end — mả — tomb.
To me, though, in the south that is my name, mother is mẹ.
The dot below signifying nặng, as in heavy.
The voice, beginning at creak, at bottom, staying down, at the edge, or mé, of low stridor: it is my son’s wheeze (my son, whom I named peace) after ingesting sesame, mè, which makes him hard to breathe, and his tongue revolts. His skin revolts. It blisters into welts.
To say mẹ is to speak with a smile while from above smiling white devils splash you with dioxin, with napalm, setting the palms on pretty fire — and you see your own mother’s lifelong poise crack — mẻ — like lacquer on a burning mask, you feel her seed of a daughter going hot inside you and you feel her whole body foreign, future-tensed, gathered to its fast, heavy, unhatched dot.