Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

Even my name knelt down inside me, asking to be spared.

For in the body, where everything has a price, I was alive. I didn’t know there was a better reason.

He moves like any other fracture, revealing the briefest doors. The dress petaling off him like the skin of an apple. As if their swords aren’t sharpening inside him. This horse with its human face. This belly full of blades & brutes. As if dancing could stop the heart of his murderer from beating between his ribs.

Show me how ruin makes a home out of hip bones.

O minute hand, teach me how to hold a man the way thirst holds water. Let every river envy our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body like a season.

If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming.

Everyone can forget us—as long as you remember.

To love another man—is to leave no one behind to forgive me. I want to leave no one behind. To keep & be kept.

Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we’re this close to the devil.

xxxxxx

Green waves surround this black rock where I sit turning bones to sonatas. Fingers blurred, I play what I know from listening to orchards unleash their sweetest wrongs.

Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy no longer a boy? Please— what becomes of the shepherd when the sheep are cannibals?

how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word.

because you were never holy only beautiful enough to be found with a hook in your mouth

& sometimes your hand is all you have to hold yourself to this world

don’t be afraid to be this luminous to be so bright so empty

I could eat you he said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.

Listen, the year is gone. I know nothing of my country. I write things down. I build a life & tear it apart & the sun keeps shining. Crescent wave. Salt-spray. Tsunami. I have enough ink to give you the sea but not the ships, but it’s my book & I’ll say anything just to stay inside this skin.

I enter my life the way words entered me— by falling through the silence of this wide open mouth

Don’t worry. Your father is only your father until one of you forgets.

& remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

Yes, here’s a room so warm & blood-close, I swear, you will wake— & mistake these walls for skin.

& there’s nothing more holy than holding a man’s heartbeat between your teeth, sharpened with too much air.