Ocean Vuong

What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force

a bunch of ants to cross a white desert?

— Cousin Sara, Age 7

& if you follow these ants

they’ll lead you back to

stone tablets

an older desert

where black bones

once buried are

now words whereI wave to you

at 2:34 am they survived

the blast by becoming

shrapnel embedded in

my brain which

is called learning but maybe

I shouldn’t talk

like this maybe I should start

over Sara I messed up I’m

trying to stay clean but

my hands are monsters

who believe in

magic Sara the throat is also

an inkwell black

oil wrung through

your father’s fingers

after a day beneath

the Buick say

heartbreak & nothing

will shatter say Stonehenge

& watch the elephants sleep

like boulders blurred

in Serengeti rain it doesn’t

have to make sense to be

real—your aunt Rose gone

two years now like

a trick they forgot

to finish & the air holds

your voice as

it holds its own

vanishing maybe you

are the true soldier

ant hoarder of

what’s so massive

it could crush you into

a twitching

comma Sara

your name sharpens daily

against the marble

of your mother’s teeth there

are sparks in every

calling & called we press

our faces to the womb

till we’re jokes on

our way to cracking up & maybe

you’re right little ant

queen with your shoes

the shade of dirty

paper white desert

your pink & blue pens

untouched after all

who can stare at

so many ruins & call it

reading this family

of ants fossilized

on the page you slam

the book shut look out

at the leafless trees

doused in red April rain

where none of us

are children long enough

to love it

October leaves coming down, as if called.

Morning fog through the wildrye beyond the train tracks.

A cigarette. A good sweater. On the sagging porch. While the family sleeps.

That I woke at all & the hawk up there thought nothing of its wings.

That I snuck onto the page while the guards were shitfaced on codeine.

That I read my books by the light of riotfire.

That my best words came farthest from myself & it’s awesome.

That you can blow a man & your voice speaks through his voice.

Like Jonah through the whale.

Because a blade of brown rye, multiplied by thousands, makes a purple field.

Because this mess I made I made with love.

Because they came into my life, these ghosts, like something poured.

Because crying, believe it or not, did wonders.

Because my uncle never killed himself—but simply died, on purpose.

Because I made a promise.

That the McDonald’s arch, glimpsed from the 2 am rehab window off Chestnut, was enough.

That mercy is small but the earth is smaller.

Summer rain hitting Peter’s bare shoulders.

The ptptptptptptpt of it.

Because I stopped apologizing into visibility.

Because this body is my last address.

Because right now, just before morning, when it’s blood-blue & the terror incumbent.

Because the sound of bike spokes heading home at dawn was unbearable.

Because the hills keep burning in California.

Through red smoke, singing. Through the singing, a way out.

Because only music rhymes with music.

The words I’ve yet to use: timothy grass, jeffrey pine, celloing, cocksure, light-lusty, midnight-green, gentled, water-thin, lord (as verb), russet, pewter, lobotomy.

The night’s worth of dust on his upper lip.

Barnjoy on the cusp of winter.

The broken piano under a bridge in Windsor that sounds like footsteps when you play it.

The Sharpied sign outside the foreclosed house:

SEEKING CAT FRIEND. PLEASE KNOCK FOR KAYLA. 

The train whistle heard through an opened window after a nightmare.

My mother, standing at the mirror, putting on blush before heading to chemo.

Sleeping in the back seat, leaving the town that broke me, whole.

Early snow falling from a clear, blushed sky.

As if called.

It’s true I’m all talk & a French tuck

but so what. Like the wind, I ride

my own life. Neon light electric

in the wet part of roadkill

on the street where I cut my teeth

on the good sin. I want to

take care of our planet

because I need a beautiful

graveyard. It’s true I’m not a writer

but a faucet underwater. When the flood comes

I’ll raise my hand so they know

who to shoot. The sky flashes. The sea

yearns. I myself

am hell. Everyone’s here. Sometimes

I go to parties just to dangle my feet

out of high windows, among people.

This boy crying in his car

after his shift at McDonald’s

on Easter Sunday. The way

he wipes his eyes with his shirt

as the big trucks blare

off the interstate. My favorite

kind of darkness is the one

inside us, I want to tell him.

&: I like the way your apron

makes it look like you’re ready

for war. I too am ready for war.

Given another chance, I’d pick the life

where I play the piano

in a room with no roof. Broken keys, Bach

sonata like footsteps fast

down the stairs as

my father chases my mother

through New England’s endless

leaves. Maybe I saw a boy

in a black apron crying in a Nissan

the size of a monster’s coffin & knew

I could never be straight. Maybe,

like you, I was one of those people

who loves the world most

when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car

going nowhere.