Elisabeth Preston-Hsu

In Songkhla, Thailand

Do not sleep towards the west, a Thai friend said.

The dead face that direction. It’s bad luck. 

I looked everywhere but west that year, for a lottery ticket,

a comfortable pair of jeans, for an avocado perfectly

ripened. I found nothing. I never knew which direction 

I faced when asleep in Thailand. Where my nightmares 

found the dead walking through me, above me, next 

to you, restless. Mudslides striped the north after days 

of rain in December. So many pieces carried to washout and slip 

in the south. Chickens suffocated by mud in the east. Cinder blocks 

scraped wounds into the hills. But these were not the bad luck. 

It was that I did not look west to you, and reach. A coolness

in all that rain’s potential. Next day’s morning on the beach, 

ghost crabs scurried west, sun pulled forward by claws

and shadows. Unraveled the air, snipped the breeze, carried

the night's heaviness away.  An attempt in a year so small 

it felt like half a breath. A breath so short, I forgot how hard 

the rain had hurt. How I pooled at the hill’s base and found

a gentle shoreline, its lip of waves closing the wound.