Night Sky with Exit Wounds

  Sextant & compass. Let’s call this autumn

  where my father sits in a $40 motel

  outside Fresno, rattling from the whiskey

  again. His fingers blurred

  like a photograph. Marvin on the stereo

  pleading brother, brother. & how

  could I have known, that by pressing

  this pen to paper, I was touching us

  back from extinction? That we were more

  than black ink on the bone

  -white backs of angels facedown

  in the blazing orchard. Ink poured

  into the shape of a woman’s calf. A woman

  I could go back & erase & erase

  but I won’t. I won’t tell you how

  the mouth will never be honest

  as its teeth. How this

  bread, daily broken, dipped

  in honey—& lifted

  with exodus tongues, like any other

  lie—is only true as your trust

  in hunger. How my father, all famine

  & fissure, will wake at 4 a.m.

  in a windowless room & not remember

  his legs. Go head, baby, he will say, put yor han

  on mai bak, because he will believe

  I am really there, that his son

  has been standing behind him all

  these years. Put yor hans on mai showduh,

  he will say to the cigarette smoke swirling

  into the ghost of a boy, Now flap. Yeah, lye dat, baby.

  Flap lye yu waving gootbai. See?

  I telling yu... I telling yu. Yor daddy?

  He fly.

  Odysseus Redux

  He entered my room like a shepherd

  stepping out of a Caravaggio.

  All that remains of the sentence

  is a line

  of black hair stranded

  at my feet.

  Back from the wind, he called to me

  with a mouthful of crickets—

  smoke & jasmine rising

  from his hair. I waited

  for the night to wane

  into decades—before reaching

  for his hands. Then we danced

  without knowing it: my shadow

  deepening his on the shag.

  Outside, the sun kept rising.

  One of its red petals fell

  through the window—& caught

  on his tongue. I tried

  to pluck it out

  but was stopped

  by my own face, the mirror,

  its cracking, the crickets, every syllable

  spilling through.

  Logophobia

  Afterward, I woke

  into the red dark

  to write

  gia đình

  on this yellow pad.

  Looking through the letters

  I can see

  into the earth

  below, the blue blur

  of bones.

  Quickly—

  I drill the ink

  into a period.

  The deepest hole,

  where the bullet,

  after piercing

  my father’s back,

  has come

  to rest.

  Quickly—I climb

  inside.

  I enter

  my life

  the way words

  entered me—

  by falling

  through

  the silence

  of this wide

  open mouth

  Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

  Ocean, don’t be afraid.

  The end of the road is so far ahead

  it is already behind us.

  Don’t worry. Your father is only your father

  until one of you forgets. Like how the spine

  won’t remember its wings

  no matter how many times our knees

  kiss the pavement. Ocean,

  are you listening? The most beautiful part

  of your body is wherever

  your mother’s shadow falls.

  Here’s the house with childhood

  whittled down to a single red trip wire.

  Don’t worry. Just call it horizon

  & you’ll never reach it.

  Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not

  a lifeboat. Here’s the man

  whose arms are wide enough to gather

  your leaving. & here the moment,

  just after the lights go out, when you can still see

  the faint torch between his legs.

  How you use it again & again

  to find your own hands.

  You asked for a second chance

  & are given a mouth to empty out of.

  Don’t be afraid, the gunfire

  is only the sound of people

  trying to live a little longer

  & failing. Ocean. Ocean—

  get up. The most beautiful part of your body

  is where it’s headed. & remember,

  loneliness is still time spent

  with the world. Here’s

  the room with everyone in it.

  Your dead friends passing

  through you like wind

  through a wind chime. Here’s a desk

  with the gimp leg & a brick

  to make it last. Yes, here’s a room

  so warm & blood-close,

  I swear, you will wake—

  & mistake these walls

  for skin.

  Devotion

  Instead, the year begins

  with my knees

  scraping hardwood,

  another man leaving

  into my throat. Fresh snow

  crackling on the window,

  each flake a letter

  from an alphabet

  I’ve shut out for good.

  Because the difference

  between prayer & mercy

  is how you move

  the tongue. I press mine

  to the navel’s familiar

  whorl, molasses threads

  descending toward

  devotion. & there’s nothing

  more holy than holding

  a man’s heartbeat between

  your teeth, sharpened

  with too much

  air. This mouth the last

  entry into January, silenced

  with fresh snow crackling

  on the window.

  & so what—if my feathers

  are burning. I

  never asked for flight.

  Only to feel

  this fully, this

  entire, the way snow

  touches bare skin—& is,

  suddenly, snow

  no longer.

  Notes

  The book’s epigraph is from Bei Dao’s “Untitled,” translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong.

  “Threshold” borrows and alters a phrase from Carl Phillips’s “Parable.”

  “Aubade with Burning City” borrows lyrics from “White Christmas,” a song written by Irving Berlin.

  The epigraph for “Immigrant Haibun” is from Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop.

  “The Gift” is after Li-Young Lee

  The title “Always & Forever” is also the name of my father’s favorite song, as performed by Luther Vandross.

  “Anaphora as Coping Mechanism” is for L.D.P.

  The title “Queen Under The Hill” is from Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” The poem borrows and alters language from Eduardo Corral’s poem “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

  “Notebook Fragments” borrows a phrase from Sandra Lim’s “The Dark World”; Nguyễn Chí Thiện was a Vietnamese dissident poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years in prison for his writings. While incarcerated, with no pen and paper, he composed and committed his poems to memory.

  The title “Someday I’
ll Love Ocean Vuong” is after Frank O’Hara and Roger Reeves.

  “Devotion” is for Peter Bienkowski.

  Also by Ocean Vuong

  No

  Burnings

  Acknowledgments

  A pot of steaming jasmine tea for the editors of the publications in which some of these poems have appeared, sometimes in different forms:

  The American Poetry Review, Assaracus, Beloit Poetry Journal, BODY Literature, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Dossier, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Gulf Coast, Linebreak, Narrative, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Normal School, PANK, Passages North, Pleiades, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland, The Poetry Review, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, Southern Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and Verse Daily.

  “Eurydice” was reprinted in The Dead Animal Handbook (2015); “Ode to Masturbation” was reprinted in Longish Poems (2015); “Always & Forever,” “Daily Bread,” “Prayer for the Newly Damned,” and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” were reprinted in The BreakBeat Poets (2015); “Deto(nation),” “Eurydice,” “Homewrecker,” and “Telemachus” were reprinted in Poets On Growth (2015); “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” was reprinted in the Pushcart Prize (2014); “Anaphora as Coping Mechanism” was reprinted in Best New Poets 2014; “Telemachus” was the winner of the 2013 Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal; “Prayer for the Newly Damned” was a winner of the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets from the American Poetry Review.

  I am grateful to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, for time and support.

  Thank you to Copper Canyon Press for believing.

  Thank you to my dear friends, teachers, and edotprs for helping me.

  Thank you, Peter, for Peter.

  Copyright 2016 by Ocean Vuong

  All rights reserved

  Cover art courtesy of the author

  ISBN: 978-1-55659-495-3

  eISBN: 978-1-61932-156-4

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  Josh Bell, Alamo Theory

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  Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

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