The cars line up in the night’s waiting room,and it’s another hour before I get out of the carand run up the overpass. Below me, headlights streamand the smells of exhaust, Tiger Balm, and sulfuric fruitrise up—just Bangkok heat and not, I insist,an anatomic shift in the air,but at the hospital, the windows are openand cotton is stuffed in your nose and mouth.You wear your blue and white checked shirt. Jeans.Earlier today you furrowed your brows,opened your eyes, and raised your handto shoo us away for making too much noise.Of course you left ahead.Maybe you jumped into a parallel laneand as I sat on my hands you passed bya profile of cheekbone, a shiny forehead; ambivalentto being seen. But a body is still a scene.On the way back to the hotel, the cars slip byeasily. At the light, I watch the incense unfurlbefore the Erawan shrine, its mirrorsand marigolds throwing off the shadowsof mammoth gray pylons. People come hereto pray, but all I have are statements, such as,I was ferried in a river.It split into channels of light.You smelled of the sun.
Bangkok Traffic
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Sophasarun, Nida. “Bangkok Traffic.” Novice: Poems, Louisiana State University Press, 2025.
Nida Sophasarun is from Atlanta, Georgia, and holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has lived and worked in Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Her poems appear in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, wildness, and elsewhere.
How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun’s Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother’s body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.
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