Night Sky with Exit Wounds

by Ocean Vuong

How a horse will run until it breaks into weather—into wind. How like the wind, they will see him. They will see him clearest when the city burns.

Immigrant Haibun The road which leads me to you is safe even when it runs into oceans. Edmond Jabès

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

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.

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

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.

/ my clock-worn girl

Không có gì bằng c ơm với cá. Không có gì bằng má với con.

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. When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.

Brooklyn’s too cold tonight & all my friends are three years away. My mother said I could be anything I wanted—but I chose to live.

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.

swarm of want you wear like a bridal veil but you don’t deserve it: the boy & his loneliness the boy who finds you beautiful only because you’re not a mirror because you don’t have enough faces to abandon you’ve come this far to be no one

you want to tell him it’s okay that the night is also a grave we climb out of

The only motive that there ever was was to ... keep them with me as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping a part of them. Jeffrey Dahmer

I never wanted the flesh. How it never fails to fail so accurately. But what if I broke through the skin’s thin page anyway & found the heart

I want to leave no one behind. To keep & be kept. The way a field turns its secrets into peonies. The way light keeps its shadow by swallowing it.

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

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

Silly me. I thought love was real & the body imaginary.

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

How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we’ve been through.

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

To even write father is to carve a portion of the day out of a bomb-bright page.

i reach down looking for you in american dirt in towns with names like hope celebration success & sweet lips like little saigon laramie money & sanford towns whose trees know the weight of history can bend their branches to breaking lines whose roots burrow through stones & hard facts

Shouldn’t heaven be superheavy by now? Maybe the rain is “sweet” because it falls through so much of the world. Even sweetness can scratch the throat, so stir the sugar well. —Grandma

God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden.

Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here. Here. That’s all I wanted to be. I promise.

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

how could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction?

The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother’s shadow falls.

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

Devotion Instead, the year begins with my knees scraping hardwood, another man leaving into my throat.

I’ve shut out for good. Because the difference between prayer & mercy is how you move the tongue.

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

so what—if my feathers are burning. I never asked for flight.