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 hold him heavy against my breast /
As he drains me. //
The essence of male and female. /
This, almost unspeakable, ails me.
My brother doesn’t remember all of it /
and I don’t either. Between us //
most of that day is lost.
a man is swallowing his penis and turning into a flower. I thought I could sit down /
and burn a hole through my suffering by sheer focus. I got distracted.
That year? I smell it mostly in the smoke of one long joint /
after another in parked cars next to emptied pools /
on summer days, days that burned into night, believing /
one turn of the key and I could drive away.
in the auditorium of several neighboring windows /
I see a single moth /
as old and miserable as the world
Kaddish is Aramaic for “holy.” /
What could be more holy than a good person? /
My mother put a magnifying glass up to God.
So now you know why I have a habit of collecting broken lines of code / For necklaces or passwords from handwritten recipes like darts dozing / In a traveling case.
Thick summer air / that warms what it chokes, and chokes what it warms. / The locked cage of a lover’s arms. And above us, the / cool prison of the Lord’s regard. What to call this - / the hatred of the earth-bound / for the sky?
I wanted to know how “good poets” /
turn pissing off of the back of a boat /
into something worth reading
I see Heathcliff /
slink out of the forest /
in the morning mist.
