trwnowyn

“Once, at a writing conference, a white man asked me if destruction was necessary for art. His question was genuine. He leaned forward, his blue gaze twitching under his cap stitched gold with ’Nam Vet 4 Life, the oxygen tank connected to his nose hissing beside him. I regarded him the way I do every white veteran from that war, thinking he could be my grandfather, and I said no. “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.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous"

i

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand

to your chest.


i

You, drowning
                        between my arms —
stay.

You, pushing your body
                         into the river
only to be left
                         with yourself —
stay.


i

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender.


i

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
                   Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
                   in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
                   mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
                   like a sparrow stunned
with falling.


i

Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.


i

I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once.


i

Say amen. Say amend.

Say yes. Say yes

anyway.


i

In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed.


i

In the life before this one, you could tell
two people were in love
because when they drove the pickup
over the bridge, their wings
would grow back just in time.

Some days I am still inside the pickup.
Some days I keep waiting.


i

It’s not too late. Our heads haloed
            with gnats & summer too early
to leave any marks.
            Your hand under my shirt as static
intensifies on the radio.
            Your other hand pointing
your daddy’s revolver
            to the sky. Stars falling one
by one in the cross hairs.
            This means I won’t be
afraid if we’re already
            here. Already more
than skin can hold. That a body
            beside a body
must ma”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain't that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous