On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.

Although he could not read chapter books yet, he knew how far a story could take him, and holding these books meant there were at least two more worlds he could eventually step into.

“No, sir, destruction is not necessary for art.” I said that, not because I was certain, but because I thought my saying it would help me believe it. But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.”

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.

I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?