Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

Maybe, like you, I was one of those people who loves the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.

we’re just two boys lying in the snow & you’re smiling because the stars are just stars & you know we’ll only live once this time

the way death enters anything—fully & without a trace

Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

Time is a mother. Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.

Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.

In one of the rooms in the house the man and I share, a loaf of rye is rising out of itself, growing lighter as it takes up more of the world. In humans, we call this Aging. In bread, we call it Proof.

In their oversize rented suits, they look like ambassadors from a country that no longer exists. It is the country of sons.

That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.

night flooding the concrete black my arms dim as incomplete sentences reader I’ve plagiarized my life to give you the best of me & these words

Ma my art these corpses I lay side by side on the page to tell you our present tense was not too late