This life I spend trying not to hurt my mother.I dry my hair before bed.Track my menstrual cycle.Take her side in Facebook arguments.Pretend I didn’t hate my father.When she says you’re lucky and don’t come back in the same breath,I take it as permission to be selfish.I live alone so I have room to cry.On the phone with her my brother lies abouthow much the taxi to my apartment cost. He tells her, Twenty dollarsbut holds up three fingers to me. Each concession, translated.It’s how we know we’re related. I tell him but not herwhen I go to protests. Forget to mention my ankle sprain.She asks do you have enough money and I never say no.Instead I write long posts on Facebook for her birthday.Reuse the same five pictures. Try to forget I haven’t seen herin seven years. This is the law of protection, enacted across oceans:My mother asks to read my poems. I forget to send them.
Confessions
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“Confessions” from FABLEMAKER: by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.
Published by Gaudy Boy on September 1, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar, and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared in POETRY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has published three poetry chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter (Thirty West Publishing House, 2022), Unsprung (Newfound, 2023), and Burma Girl (Gold Line Press, 2026). She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
On February 1, 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup d’etat, imprisoning the country’s democratically elected leaders and declaring a state of emergency. In response, the people of Myanmar sustained ongoing protest acts in full defiance the military. Mandy Moe Pwint Tu’s debut, Fablemaker, written during the Spring Revolution, weaves together a troubled familial history and a national reckoning.
The collection follows the speaker as she contends with her father’s untimely death, her country’s crisis, and her de facto exile to the United States. Wrought with tenderness, the poems bear witness to loss, rage, grief, and love—and the fables she created to survive it all. Through Burmese folklore, formal invention, and addresses to a “dear fellow fablemaker,” Tu strives to imagine a self and a world that, after their devastation, recover.
“Above the miasmata of a military milieu, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a sybil possessed with grief. Homesick for a sick home, she invokes the lore of the land. She laces into her incompetent hosts and omnipresent ghosts. In a blazing display of ပါရမီ [bravura and bravado], she gently coaches us through a transgenerational trauma. Each of her utterances a lesson—in runic risk. Not every first monsoon promises မြေသင်းနံ့ [petrichor]. Fablemaker absolutely does.”
—ko ko thett, poet and translator, Bamboophobia
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