“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… — 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
