Playground

Teresa Mei Chuc

4 months ago

“Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The tank was the color of desert sand,

it rolled by like a slow-moving beetle

and dropped a glove gently to the ground.

The glove was a baseball glove.

A few boys huddled around

and one of them picked it up.

Inside the glove was a metal ball. A glove and a ball.

Another boy suggested taking the ball apart

and selling the metal pieces.

The boys began to hammer it.

One of the boys held the ball in his hand

and threw it against the wall.

The ball bounced back and exploded in his abdomen.

The dead boy was brought to the morgue.

Women gathered to identify the mutilated body.

The boys who survived walked around with furrowed brows

and a deep silence that only such shock could induce

surrounded by wails—a room full of people without furniture,

drowning in a sea of sand, sand they had believed held water.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Teresa Mei Chuc was born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam and fled her Vietnamese homeland with her mother and brother shortly after the American war, spending three and a half months in a freight boat stranded in the East Sea before being rescued. Her father, who had served in the Army of the Republic of Việt Nam, was imprisoned in a Việt Cộng “re-education” camp for nine years. From 1993 to 1994 and from 1996 to 1997, Teresa traveled to and lived in Palestine to gain more understanding after seeing the horror in Gaza on the news. Her poems, “Playground” and “Eternity in Gaza” are based on scenes from the 2002 documentary Gaza Strip filmed by James Longley. She is the Altadena Poet Laureate, Editor-in-Chief (2018-2020) and English Teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District for nineteen years, Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014) and Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012). She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2025), and her poetry was recently published in Here Was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting (University of Hawaii Press, 2023).

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