Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

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

He moves like any other fracture, revealing the briefest doors. The dress petaling off him like the skin of an apple.

& I am your son.

How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer—only to pick up the pieces? If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth.

I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning. That if I looked through it, I would see the end of this sentence.

The way the barrel, aimed at the sky, must tighten around a bullet to make it speak

& 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

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.

That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs.

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.

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.

bruised with 9pm

& 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

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

& so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing to surrender.

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling.

Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?

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

Queen Under The Hill

The imagery in this poem goes craaaazy

I kneel at my beast. The sheet sunken at her ribs. A dented piano where rain, collected from the night, reflects a blue sky fallen into the side of a horse.

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

Now here is your father inside your lungs. Look how lighter the earth is—afterward. To even write father is to carve a portion of the day out of a bomb-bright page.

don’t be afraid to be this luminous to be so bright so empty the bullets pass right through you thinking they have found the sky

Just like that.

I think I love my mom very much.

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

Because in my hurry to make her real, make her here, I will forget to write a bit of light into the room. Because my hands were always brief & dim as my father’s. & it will start to rain.

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. Sassafras. Douglas fir. Sextant & compass.

Quickly— I drill the ink into a period. The deepest hole, where the bullet, after piercing my father’s back, has come to rest.

of this wide open mouth

Your father is only your father until one of you forgets.

Ocean. Ocean— get up. The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed. & remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world.

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