On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

by Ocean Vuong

What is a country but a life sentence?

I am handsome at exactly three angles and deadly from everywhere else.

When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

The cruelest walls are made of glass, Ma.

Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

He smokes the way one smokes after a funeral.

I loved the way the pastor’s hands moved, flowed, as if his sentences had to be shaken off him in order to reach us.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother, he says after the death of his own mother, in order to glorify it, to embellish it.

He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration.

Sometimes, when I’m careless, I believe the wound is also the place where the skin reencounters itself, asking of each end, where have you been?

wait alone under an awning for the bus that will take me across the river, to the town that holds everything Trevor except Trevor himself.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Con nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I am thinking of freedom again, how the calf is most free when the cage opens and it’s led to the truck for slaughter. All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders.