“How insufficient the memory, to fail before death. how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song lingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human… — 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 our entire curved and silenced selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that are being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of… — Ocean Vuong Copy Share
“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 live. On the stoop of an old brownstone, a cigarette flares, then fades. I walk towards it: a razor sharpened with silence. A jawline etched in smoke. The mouth where I’ll be made new again. Stranger,… — Ocean Vuong Copy Share
“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
