Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine Van Gogh singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” into his cut ear & feeling peace. Green voices in the rain, green rain in the voices.

say heartbreak & nothing will shatter say Stonehenge & watch the elephants sleep like boulders blurred in Serengeti rain it doesn’t have to make sense to be real—your

& maybe you’re right little ant queen with your shoes the shade of dirty paper white desert your pink & blue pens untouched after all who can stare at so many ruins & call it reading this family of ants fossilized on the page you slam the book shut look out at the leafless trees doused in red April rain where none of us are children long enough to love it

once, after weeks of drought, I walked through my brother’s laughter just to feel the rain. O wind-broke wanderer, widow of hope & ha-has. O sister, dropped seed—help me— I was made to die but I’m here to stay.

Maybe I saw a boy in a black apron crying in a Nissan the size of a monster’s coffin & knew I could never be straight. 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.

a wide porch—like you wanted— sunflowers in the front yard late afternoon light on the latticed apple pie

but the birds are just holes in the gunshot sky oh man the aubade left to rot into afternoon when every word was forgotten as soon as the hand moved across the page away

The way the streetlight blinks twice, before waking up for its night shift, like we do.

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold. Our sorrow Midas touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow. Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.

They say the earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the music. It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine-gun fire. Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way.

What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for love is Yêu. And the word for weakness is Yếu.

Amazon History of a Former Nail Salon Worker

This poem hit me hard in the chest

And the dahlias raise their heads, their chins high along the courthouse lawn.

Rain: to give something a name just to watch it fall. What will I name you? Are you a boy or a girl or a translation of crushed water? It doesn’t matter. Maybe extinction is temporary.