Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

I open the shoe box dusted with seven winters & here, sunk in folds of yellowed news -paper, lies the Colt .45—silent & heavy as an amputated hand. I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning.

& 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.

It’s not too late. Our heads haloed with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver to the sky. Stars dropping one by one in the crosshairs. This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already here. Already more than skin can hold. That a boy sleeping beside a boy must make a field full of ticking. That to say your name is to hear the sound of clocks being turned back another hour & morning finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies.

Prayer for the Newly Damned Dearest Father, forgive me for I have seen. Behind the wooden fence, a field lit with summer, a man pressing a shank to another man’s throat. Steel turning to light on sweat-slick neck. 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, into what a boy hears in his need to know how pain blesses the body back to its sinner. The hour suddenly stilled. The man, his lips pressed to the black boot. Am I wrong to love those eyes, to see something so clear & blue—beg to remain clear & blue? Did my cheek twitch when the wet shadow bloomed from his crotch & trickled into ochre dirt? How quickly the blade becomes You. But let me begin again: There’s a boy kneeling in a house with every door kicked open to summer. There’s a question corroding his tongue. A knife touching Your finger lodged inside the throat. Dearest Father, what becomes of the boy no longer a boy? Please— what becomes of the shepherd when the sheep are cannibals?

Don’t stay here, he said, my boy broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry anymore. So I ran. I ran into the night. The night: my shadow growing toward my father

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.