Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

in the body, where everything has a price,

in his back, brimming with seawater. He is so still I think he could be anyone’s father, found the way a green bottle might appear at a boy’s feet containing a year he has never touched.

They will see him clearest when the city burns.

Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us.

If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.

The smallest pearls—and all for you.

His face between my hands, wet as a cut.

He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.

Everyone’s shouting or singing and he can’t tell whether the song is for him—or the burning rooms he mistook for childhood.

Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish.

If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.

hand. I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning.

& there are things / I can say only in the dark

I didn’t know / how easy it was / to be gone

my clock-worn girl

The dolphin’s eye gasping like a newborn’s mouth.

am chasing my father the way the dead chase after days—&

Brooklyn’s too cold tonight & all my friends are three years away.

I am ready to be every animal you leave behind.

Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god to give it back.

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.

a swarm of want you wear like a bridal veil but you don’t deserve it:

You’re so quiet you’re almost tomorrow.

the skin’s thin page

Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once.

Say amen. Say amend.

There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life. & I took nothing. Nothing.

Forgive me for not twisting this tongue into the shape of Your name. For thinking: this must be how every prayer begins—the word Please cleaving the wind into fragments,

Know that I never chose which way the seasons turned. That it was always October in my throat & you: every leaf refusing to rust.

Shouldn’t heaven be superheavy by now?

Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?

Either way, I forgot his name by heart.

Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here.

The Smallest Measure Behind the fallen oak, the Winchester rattles in a boy’s early hands. A copper beard grazes his ear. Go ahead. She’s all yours... Heavy with summer, I am the doe whose one hoof cocks like a question ready to open roots. & like any god -forsaken thing, I want nothing more than my breaths. To lift this snout, carved from centuries of hunger, toward the next low peach bruising in the season’s clutch. Go ahead, the voice thicker now, drive her home. But the boy is crying into the carcass of a tree—cheeks smeared with snot & chipped bark. Once, I came near enough to a man to smell a woman’s scent in his quiet praying— as some will do before raising their weapons closer to the sky. But through the grained mist that makes this morning’s minutes, this smallest measure of distance, I see two arms unhinging the rifle from the boy’s grip, its metallic shine sharpened through wet leaves. I see the rifle... the rifle coming down, then gone. I see an orange cap touching an orange cap. No, a man bending over his son the way the hunted, for centuries, must bend over its own reflection to drink.

I write things down. I build a life & tear it apart & the sun keeps shining.

Don’t be afraid, the gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer & failing.

Your dead friends passing through you like wind through a wind chime.

the difference between prayer & mercy is how you move the tongue.

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