FABLE WITH FROGS

On February 10, 2024, Myanmar’s military junta announced it would mandate conscription for the first time since the People’s Military Service Law was passed in 2010. Under the law, all men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 are eligible to serve in the armed forces for at least two years.

—The Diplomat Begin: a family of frogs, sitting nervously

together. Once, the pond was a puddle,

but the gravel gave way beneath plodding

wheels, and the rains that came did not know

how to cease. Enter: snakes with rifles,

green as jackfruit skin. Saying, Give us

your son. Hunger grips us like water.

Mother Frog weeping, clutching her son’s

webbed feet, her tongue like bamboo shoots

in her mouth. He’s too young, she begs.

Please. He’s my only son. Who will rub balm

on my joints on rainy days? Who will sit with me

when the thunder clamours so loud it shakes

the ground? Who will protect me when

the burglars clamber over our netted wall to steal

the last of my mother’s jewels? But the snakes

unhinge their jaws. They swallow him whole.

THIRD SPRING

in response to Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War”

I sit                  in summer,
stalled, statuesque.

In a poem        I summon
a pile of bodies

touched with blood,
clumped                      and wet–

tall enough      to climb over.

In Bagan,        the pagodas
drown. Each golden temple

an upturned cup
suspended in spillage.

In her apartment my mother
moves              the tables

away from the windows.
A lifetime ago             there were

mangoes          knocking with the rain.
But the cyclone comes,

spins gunfire               streaking
from the sky. Every day

an airstrike—on hands
that might have wrung

poems,             feet that might
have waded                 through lake water,

eyes that could have read Kaminsky

and cried, We lived.

I WAS ALWAYS A POET WITH A DEAD FATHER

My first love poem was a poem for my father.

He was young like me.

He was young until me.

When he died, he stammered ash.

The kind we begged to keep. 

The kind we couldn’t.

What use have I for a living father?

Present like the sun, beloved,

watching sparrows bend the grass.

Some other life he sees where I am now.

He’s proud. My epigraphs are lines

he approves of. My poet daughter, he says. 

Just like her father. I break my father’s

memory on frozen lakes. Cast it over

the cattails. How thin his hair.

How soft his flesh. In lieu of an epitaph

I want to know what happened to his glasses. 

Whether his last words were a poem. 

And if I say they were? Across the sea

his ghost waits in a yellow-walled house.

A man, still lonely. Old as a country.

Young as a nation. He takes a breath

I am still holding.

*

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 or is forthcoming 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. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Composition & Rhetoric at UW-Madison.