TORSO OF AIR
Suppose you do change your life.
& the body is more than
a portion of night—sealed
with bruises. Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful
and gone. So you take the knife to the wall
instead. You carve & carve.
Until a coin of light appears
& you get to look in, for once,
on happiness. The eye
staring back from the other side—
waiting.
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OCEAN VUONG is the author of two chapbooks: NO (YesYes Books, 2013) and BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection. A recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Poems appear in American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Poetry Northwest, and The Normal School, amongst others. He lives in Queens, NY.
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Read more by Ocean Vuong:
Poem in Guernica
I learn it means people prone to sadness / who develop depression, but it reminds me / of a favorite Chinese restaurant: Double / Happiness...
For hours in a small windowless freezing room, I spliced digital video and created fine fades—just so. I did not save my projects in the media bin. I did not name or save a thing.
I was having an affair with my partner’s therapist, and she was having an affair with mine.
I am a panting dog of a parent, running /
to retrieve so many arms, legs, lips, /
breasts, million nipples.
We never went to the moon. Instead we grew roses and fed our neighbor pasta and fruit salad.
In our latest interview, we talk to David Biespiel about his latest volume of poetry, Republic Café, a long poem that explores the radical intimacy of public trauma and what it means to inhabit the reality of the body politic within one's own skin.
Some stories should be left alone because there is no way to defend them /
and no way not to see ourselves in the darkest versions of others.
it might be said that whoever planted their heels /
against the uprooted soil and lit a match against /
a mute sky / disconnected night did not /
set fire to but merely blew a spark
A dog growled and barked. Good dog, / I heard, unsure if it was my voice / or my dog.
The dementia fractures her /
the same way ice splits a rock.
