“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft -- no matter how soft her skin is.” — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Green waves surround this black rock where I sit turning bones to sonatas. Fingers blurred, I play what I know from listening to orchards… — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“I watched, through the keyhole, not the man showering, but the rain falling through him: guitar strings snapping over his globed shoulders” — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself.” — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning” — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word” — Ocean Vuong Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
