I met my brother once in a small village in Vietnam who, upon meeting me grabbed my small arm & dragged me into the woods behind his house where a group of men all wearing our father's face stood in a circle, cheering while the two roosters whose beaks had barbed hooks taped to them, pecked & clawed each other open until the mess of bloodied feathers were replaced by two clean birds one, my brother's. The other a man's, who, I am told is deaf but vicious. He told me our father calls him long distance from America, every week. I can't help but wonder how they tell the roosters apart since the blood has turned their feathers the same shade of burgundy. I told him how our father, who lives only three mile away from me avoids making eye-contact at supermarkets. I can tell this made him happy. Though, he didn't cheer when the crowd cheered, when one rooster fell to the dirt with a gash in its neck I knew he was the winner the way he lowered his head to hide his smile, how he looked at me then snatched his earnings from the vicious man's hands. I learned what it was like to be a brother by watching the roosters & how, at first, the air was calm until they were introduced & then they knew: there could only be one.
187 The Paris-American
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author ofThis
Way to the Sugar(Write Bloody Press, 2014). Hieu is a Kundiman
fellow, a recipient of the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft
Literary Center, and recently appeared in Poets
& Writers 2014 Debut Poets feature. His work has also appeared or is
forthcoming in publications such as The
Journal, PANK, Anti, Muzzle, Vinyl, Indiana Review, and other journals. He
also works at a haberdashery.