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
Here is the image of a wife
in a thatched smokehouse––
she sleepwalks from fire
to fire, setting start again.
Afraid / to ask, I wonder if Joko was tested. / I don’t want to put him on the spot / and I know I’d think less of him / if he gave the wrong answer.
slut, thug, doper, bitch, her voice never rising above a whisper. These words may make you uncomfortable.
The woman carrying her life, /
who passed by a moment ago, calls out /
from the next street and someone answers, /
but not to her.
She’s never invited me to one of her parties. / Well, she invited me once. // Once I got there, she never talked to me. /
Never offered me a glass of wine. // Her brain must be a crowded / little place telling her, You’re terrific!
They had more interesting curses than ‘fuck’. /
They loved the views that they made for the future, /
for the people who were lucky enough /
to be born after them.
perjury of lightning bolts: /
a fish spine rises from the trenches of the wound-up day, /
disrupting darkness
At night I become his missing arm. /
The one he lost on the front, looked for /
years later and didn´t find.
Bless the silence. Bless the hiss. Bless the punch. /
Bless the kiss. Bless the lemon. Bless the lime. //
Bless the fishbone in the throat of time.
I went out to my mailbox. /
Everything was addressed to a previous occupant (twice removed) /
who is now, /
according to my neighbors, / deceased.
