"That Happened," and Other Poems

By Maung Htike Aung

That Happened

There was the cape primrose 
On a white windowsill. 
A boy stayed till late at night
To question or to explain 
How his day went that way. 
Nights sounding weary
Crows roaming in daylight
Great nothings in your bowl
The plant survived them 
Getting spines, spines, more spines.
There is now a cactus 
Questioning the old man
On his crutches 
That has tried hard 
To unseal his hushed mouth
His head on the broken windowsill 
Its paint peeling in places.

Linn Let Arkar, Myanmar, 2021.
Image description: The back of a man wearing military fatigues and casual trousers with a geometric pattern, walking through a lush grove of banana trees.

Just A Little Happened

It was mothers and big sisters, and it wasn’t them.
Time had a way of deciding our hairstyle.
With its cold, big hands, we were barbered. 
It was ‌ a Tiger Year, a tiger on a rampage
Ripping the sky like missiles these days. 
A crew-cut kid went to cooperative stores for soaps.
Came back as the grown-up with yellow nails. 
But luckily, most kids didn’t make it home. 
Wounds, crutches, shell shock eating you up.
At a barbershop, a pair of old crutches 
Tells the stories of mothers and sisters
That touch long hair, wash it, rub it 
Late into the night to put long hair to sleep.
A little, just a little, was enough.

Linn Let Arkar, Myanmar, 2021.
Image description: Close-up of man’s hand lifting his sleeve to show the palm of the other hand with bruises.

Mothballs 

A new morning is retarded by the stench of old socks.  
A  hawker rides her rusty bicycle slowly—the same time every morning, her voice numbs the squirrels foraging for food. 
At times, we buy boiled chickpeas from her. 
Nan bread becomes sacred now.

“Good morning,” to my wife is my unending ritual. 
There are days we simply say it without the adjective. 
Bombs mute the night and murder our breakfast. 
Blackouts bring us together, inflation us closer. 

We grow a deep conversation. Often it gets deeper, and vertigo dreads us. 
O foreparents, you are gone, but the co-operative stores 
of your days have come back to life. 

A group of people queue up at a store, a gas station, and a well,
but are not gathering for ferocious fun. 
You will see me there this time and that. 
If the sky is blue, we just call it fine. 

A sunny day conjures me to run the red light. 
You must have seen too much.
You must have been too terrified.
You must have tried to end this felled end.

Let me count the reasons why I am here. 
To cultivate flowers in this chronic war
To find a flower on the 5th of October
To be eaten up by time timed by corpses. 

It is enough to lie dead in bed after ten-hour-a-day-work. 
But it’s not enough to eat a proper dinner. 
Inflation gets us more romantic, the room candlelit.
On special occasions, we share an expensive apple, but we aren’t romanticizing.
As if the world was swallowed by an unborn whale, the dark thickens. 
We get into each other's day till nothing is left to get rid of. 

In the middle of the night, you might see me burying human things in pages. Or teeth-grinding them on the periphery of sleep. 

Linn Let Arkar, Myanmar, 2021.
Image description: Seated man unfurls an MRI grid that shows his brain injuries, obscuring his face. The open door leading into the darkness of a wooden shack forms the backdrop.

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Maung Htike Aung is a Burma-based poet, literary translator and educator from Mandalay, Myanmar. His poems and translations have appeared Portside Review, Wasafiri, and Volume Poetry, The /tƐmz/ Review, and Mekong Review.

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Linn Let Arkar is a photographer and videographer from Myanmar. Since the 2021 Military coup d'état, he has chiefly focused on documenting resistance efforts and the impact of the military. His work reveals the emotional and tragic dimensions of the revolution while capturing thought- provoking aspects of quotidien life.

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