Green waves surround this black rock where I sit turning…

“It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus— that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying with…

— Ocean Vuong

“I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering, but the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders”

— Ocean Vuong

“Brooklyn’s too cold tonight & all my friends are three years away. My mother said I could be anything I wanted—but I chose to…

— Ocean Vuong

“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…

— Ocean Vuong

“As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself.”

— Ocean Vuong

“The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed.”

— Ocean Vuong

“God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden. My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights.…

— Ocean Vuong

“Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky.”

— Ocean Vuong

“I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning”

— Ocean Vuong

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it,…

— Ocean Vuong

“Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory,…

— Ocean Vuong

“use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word”

— Ocean Vuong

“I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”

— Ocean Vuong

“When they ask you where you're from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not…

— Ocean Vuong

“Woke up screaming with no sound. The room filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead just in…

— Ocean Vuong