Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

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.