by Ocean Vuong
I looked through it, I would see the end of this
sentence. Or maybe just a man kneeling
at the boy’s bed, his grey overalls reeking of gasoline
& cigarettes. Maybe the day will close without
the page turning as he wraps his arms around
the boy’s milk-blue shoulders. The boy pretending
to be asleep as his father’s clutch tightens.
The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten
around a bullet
to make it speak
My Father Writes from Prison
Lan oi,
Em khỏe khong? Giờ em đang ở đâu? Anh nhờ em va con qua. Hơn nữa & there are things / I can say only in the dark / how one spring / I crushed a monarch midflight / just to know how it felt / to have something change / in my hands / here are those hands / some nights they waken when touched / by music or rather the drops of rain / memory erases into music / hands reaching for the scent of lilacs / in the moss-covered temple a shard / of dawn in the eye of a dead / rat your voice on the verge of / my hands that pressed the 9mm to the boy’s / twitching cheek I was 22 the chamber / empty I didn’t know / how easy it was / to be gone these hands / that dragged the saw through bluest 4 a.m. / cricket screams the kapok’s bark spitting / in our eyes until one or two collapsed / the saw lodged in blue dark until one or three / started to run from their country into / their country / the ak-47 the lord whose voice will stop / the lilac / how to close the lilac / that opens daily from my window / there’s a lighthouse / some nights you are the lighthouse / some nights the sea / what this means is that I don’t know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt / the mind forgetting / the body’s crime of living / again dear Lan or / Lan oi what does it matter / there’s a man in the next cell who begs / nightly for his mother’s breast / a single drop / I think my eyes are like his / watching the night bleed through / the lighthouse night that cracked mask / I wear after too many rifle blows / Lan oi! Lan oi! Lan oi! / I’m so hungry / a bowl of rice / a cup of you / a single drop / my clock-worn girl / my echo trapped in ’88 / the cell’s too cold tonight & there are things / I can say only where the monarchs / no longer come / with wings scraping the piss-slick floor for fragments of a / phantom woman I push my face / against a window the size of your palm where / beyond the shore / a grey dawn lifts the hem of your purple dress / & I ignite
Headfirst
Không có gì bằng c ơm với cá.
Không có gì bằng má với con.
Vietnamese proverb
Don’t you know? A mother’s love
neglects pride
the way fire
neglects the cries
of what it burns. My son,
even tomorrow
you will have today. Don’t you know?
There are men who touch breasts
as they would
the tops of skulls. Men
who carry dreams
over mountains, the dead
on their backs.
But only a mother can walk
with the weight
of a second beating heart.
Stupid boy.
You can get lost in every book
but you’ll never forget yourself
the way god forgets
his hands.
When they ask you
where you’re from,
tell them your name
was fleshed from the toothless mouth
of a war-woman.
That you were not born
but crawled, headfirst—
into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them
the body is a blade that sharpens
by cutting.
In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek to a Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back
& close his eyes. His hair the shade
of its cracked flesh.
His right arm, inked with three falling
phoenixes—torches
marking the lives he had
or had not taken—cradles
the pinkish snout. Its teeth
gleaming like bullets.
Huey. Tomahawk. Semi
-automatic. I was static
as we sat in the Nissan, watching waves
brush over our breaths
when he broke for shore, hobbled
on his gimp leg. Mustard
-yellow North Face jacket
diminishing toward the grey life
smeared into ours. Shrapnel
-strapped. Bushwhacker. The last time
I saw him run like that, he had
a hammer in his fist, mother
a nail-length out of reach.
America. America a row of streetlights
flickering on his whiskey
-lips as we ran. A family
screaming down Franklin Ave.
ADD. PTSD. POW. Pow. Pow. Pow
says the sniper. Fuck you
says the father, tracers splashing
through palm leaves. Confetti
green, how I want you green.
Green despite the red despite
the rest. His knees sunk
in ink-black mud, he guides
a ribbon of water to the pulsing
blowhole. Ok. Okay. AK
-47. I am eleven only once
as he kneels to gather the wet refugee
into his arms. Waves
swallowing
his legs. The dolphin’s eye
gasping like a newborn’s
mouth. & once more
I am swinging open
the passenger door. I am running
toward a rusted horizon, running
out of a country
to run out of. I am chasing my father
the way the dead chase after
days—& although I am still
too far to hear it, I can tell,
by the way his neck tilts
to one side, as if broken,
that he is singing
my favorite song
to his empty hands.
The Gift
a b c a b c a b c
She doesn’t know what comes after.
So we begin again:
a b c a b c a b c
But I can see the fourth letter:
a strand of black hair—unraveled
from the alphabet
& written
on her cheek.
Even now the nail salon
will not leave her: isopropyl acetate,
ethyl acetate, chloride, sodium lauryl
sulfate & sweat fuming
through her pink
I NY t-shirt.
a b c a b c a —the pencil snaps.
The b bursting its belly
as dark dust blows
through a blue-lined sky.
Don’t move, she says, as she picks
a wing bone of graphite
from the yellow carcass, slides it back
between my fingers.
Again. & again
I see it: the strand of hair lifting
from her face... how it fell
onto the page—& lived
with no sound. Like a word.
I still hear it.
Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds
Instead, let it be the echo to every footstep
drowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name
flung onto a sinking boat, splash the kapok’s bark
through rot & iron of a city trying to forget
the bones beneath its sidewalks, then through
the refugee camp sick with smoke & half-sung
hymns, a shack rusted black & lit with Bà Ngoại’s
last candle, the hogs’ faces we held in our hands
& mistook for brothers, let it enter a room illuminated
with snow, furnished only with laughter, Wonder Bread
& mayonnaise raised to cracked lips as testament
> to a triumph no one recalls, let it brush the newborn’s
flushed cheek as he’s lifted in his father’s arms, wreathed
with fishgut & Marlboros, everyone cheering as another
brown gook crumbles under John Wayne’s M16, Vietnam
burning on the screen, let it slide through their ears,
clean, like a promise, before piercing the poster
of Michael Jackson glistening over the couch, into
the supermarket where a Hapa woman is ready
to believe every white man possessing her nose
is her father, may it sing, briefly, inside her mouth,
before laying her down between jars of tomato
& blue boxes of pasta, the deep-red apple rolling
from her palm, then into the prison cell
where her husband sits staring at the moon
until he’s convinced it’s the last wafer
god refused him, let it hit his jaw like a kiss
we’ve forgotten how to give one another, hissing
back to ’68, Ha Long Bay: the sky replaced
with fire, the sky only the dead
look up to, may it reach the grandfather fucking
the pregnant farmgirl in the back of his army jeep,
his blond hair flickering in napalm-blasted wind, let it pin
him down to dust where his future daughters rise,
fingers blistered with salt & Agent Orange, let them
tear open his olive fatigues, clutch that name hanging
from his neck, that name they press to their tongues
to relearn the word live, live, live—but if
for nothing else, let me weave this deathbeam
the way a blind woman stitches a flap of skin back
to her daughter’s ribs. Yes—let me believe I was born
to cock back this rifle, smooth & slick, like a true
Charlie, like the footsteps of ghosts misted through rain
as I lower myself between the sights—& pray
that nothing moves.
II
Thanksgiving 2006
Brooklyn’s too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted—but I chose to live.
On the stoop of an old brownstone,
a cigarette flares, then fades.
I walk to it: a razor
sharpened with silence.
His jawline etched in smoke.
The mouth where I reenter
this city. Stranger, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled with blood thin
as a widow’s tears. I am ready.
I am ready to be every animal
you leave behind.
Homewrecker
& this is how we danced: our mothers’
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August
turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers
through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered
our ears & your father’s tantrum turned
to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart
there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above
the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg
some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not
the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance
we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:
this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue.
Of Thee I Sing
We made it, baby.
We’re riding in the back of the black
limousine. They have lined
the road to shout our names.
They have faith in your golden hair
& pressed grey suit.
They have a good citizen
in me. I love my country.
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I pretend not to see the man
& his blond daughter diving
for cover, that you’re not saying
my name & it’s not coming out
like a slaughterhouse.
I’m not Jackie O yet
& there isn’t a hole in your head, a brief
rainbow through a mist
of rust. I love my country
but who am I kidding? I’m holding
your still-hot thoughts in,
darling, my sweet, sweet
Jack. I’m reaching across the trunk
for a shard of your memory,
the one where we kiss & the nation
glitters. Your slumped back.
Your hand letting go. You’re all over
the seat now, deepening
my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good
citizen, surrounded by Jesus
& ambulances. I love
this country. The twisted faces.
My country. The blue sky. Black
limousine. My one white glove
glistening pink—with all
our American dreams.
Because It’s Summer
you ride your bike to the park bruised
with 9pm the maples draped with plastic bags
shredded from days the cornfield
freshly razed & you’ve lied
about where you’re going you’re supposed
to be out with a woman you can’t find
a name for but he’s waiting
in the baseball field behind the dugout
flecked with newports torn condoms
he’s waiting with sticky palms & mint
on his breath a cheap haircut
& his sister’s levis
stench of piss rising from wet grass
it’s june after all & you’re young
until september he looks different
from his picture but it doesn’t matter
because you kissed your mother
on the cheek before coming
this far because the fly’s dark slit is enough
to speak through the zipper a thin scream
where you plant your mouth
to hear the sound of birds
hitting water snap of elastic
waistbands four hands quickening
into dozens: a swarm of want you wear
like a bridal veil but you don’t
deserve it: the boy &
his loneliness the boy who finds you
beautiful only because you’re not
a mirror because you don’t have
enough faces to abandon you’ve come
this far to be no one & it’s june
until morning you’re young until a pop song
plays in a dead kid’s room water spilling in
from every corner of summer & you want
to tell him it’s okay that the night is also a grave
we climb out of but he’s already fixing
his collar the cornfield a cruelty steaming
with manure you smear your neck with
lipstick you dress with shaky hands
you say thank you thank you thank you
because you haven’t learned the purpose
of forgive me because that’s what you say
when a stranger steps out of summer
& offers you another hour to live
Into the Breach
The only motive that there ever was was to ...
keep them with me as long as possible, even if
it meant just keeping a part of them.
Jeffrey Dahmer
I pull into the field & cut the engine.
how to love a man
gently. Tenderness
a thing to be beaten
into. Fireflies strung
through sapphired air.
You’re so quiet you’re almost
tomorrow.