Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

childhood is only a cage that widens like this sunlight honest through the clinic window

how come the past tense is always longer? Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much? Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace.

I’m too tired she said to be this happy

There is so much room in a person there should be more of us in here. Traveler who is inches away but never here, are you warm where you are? Are you you where you are?

Peter, she says, Peter, as if the dead could be called back into new, stunned bones.

I gave it hands despite knowing that to stretch that clay slab into five blades of light, I would go too far. Because I, too, needed a place to hold me.

You feel for your throat because history has proven the skull lodged in the gravedigger’s hands is often the one behind your face. But these are marigolds, they say. And these the horses.

For the first time in weeks I saw my reflection in the cup of coffee & kept drinking anyway.

I used my arsenal of defunct verbs & broke into a library of second chances, the ER.