Time Is a Mother, page 5
your life into this one if
you’re reading this
then the bullet doesn’t know us
yet but I know Ma you can’t
read napalm fallen on your
schoolhouse at six & that
was it they say a word
is only what it
signifies that’s how I know
the arrowhead in my
back means I’m finally
pretty a word like bullet
hovers in an amber
afternoon on its way to
meaning the book opens like
a door but the only one you
ever read was a coffin its
hinges swung shut on lush descriptions
of a brother I point to
you to me today a Thursday I
took a long walk alone it
didn’t work kept stopping
to touch my shadow just in case
feeling is the only truth
& there down
there between thumb & forefinger
an ant racing in circles then zigzags
I wanted significance but think
it was just the load he was bearing
that unhinged him: another ant
curled & cold lifted on
his shoulders they looked like a set
of quotations missing speech it’s said
they can carry over 5,000 times their mass
but it’s often bread crumbs
not brothers that get carried
home but going too far
is to admit the day ends anywhere
but here no no Mom this
is your name I say pointing
to Hồng on the birth certificate thin
as dust Hồng I say which means
rose I place your finger on a flower so
familiar it feels synthetic red
plastic petals dewed with glue I leave
it out of my poems I turn from
its face—clichéd oversize
head frayed at the edges
like something ruptured
by a bullet I was born
because you were starving but
how can anything be
found with only two hands
with only two hands you dumped
a garbage bag of anchovies into the glass jar
the day was harmless a breeze hovering
in amber light above us gray
New England branches swayed without
touching to make fish sauce you said
you must bear the scent of corpses
salted & crushed a year in a jar tall
as a boy they dropped with slick
thumps like bullets each word must stop
somewhere—why not a yellow
poet I put in the fish sauce I take out
the fish sauce I dance
on the line until I am the line
they cross or cross
out they nearly killed me
you said for being white
with a toilet plunger you pushed the fish
down sound of bones like gravel
the violet vein on your wrist glistened
your father was a white soldier
I had amber hair you said they called me
traitor called me ghost
girl they smeared my face with cow shit
at the market to make me brown
like you & your father the eyes glared
from inside the jar they shot
my brother you said looking down
but away from the dead
eyes my little brother
if reading is to live
in two worlds at once why
is he not here Ben said you can do
anything in a poem
so I stepped right out of it into
this one to be entered is
to be redefined the bullet achieves its name
by pushing flesh into flesh I was struck
by these words we say I was caught by
this passage it moved right through opened
me up these eyes reading not
yet healed shut but full of lead
-en meaning which parts
a red sea inside me sinew dusted to soft tissue
my blood a borderless translation
of errors in the reader’s
hands a gaping rose Hồng
I say which also means
pink the shade every bullet meets
before finding its truest self Calvino said
human instinct is to laugh
when someone falls the soldiers
were cracking up as they fired
your brother running his sky
-blue shirt pink on the ground
our evolution as hunters Calvino went on
the collapsed body a signal
of meat thus hunger leads to lethal
joy it’s almost perfect
you smiled your nose deep
in the jar because the bullet
makes you real by making you less
which is perfect in poems the text
amplified by murder
-ous deletions leads to inevitable
art the pristine prisoner
in his marble coffin the length
of a fish a timeline
across the page to document days
the dead a measurement of
living distance
the corpse blooming
as it decays Pink Rose Hồng Mom
are you reading this dear
reader are you my mom yet
I cannot find her without you this
place I’ve made you can’t
enter within months their meat
will melt into brown mucus rot almost
-sauce the linear fish-spine dissolved
by time at last pungent scent
of ghosts you said you named me
after a body of water ’cause
it’s the largest thing you knew
after god I stare at the silvered layers
the shadowed line between two pressed fish
is a finger in the dark gently remembered
in the dark his finger
on my lips Ma his shhh
your friend the man watching me
while you worked the late
shift in the Timex clock factory why
am I thinking this now the gasped throats
mottled pocked fins gently the door its blade
of amber light widening as it opened
shhh it sounds like an animal
being drowned as you churned
the jar your yellow-white arms pink
fish guts foaming up gently you must
remember gently the man he’s in
the ’90s still his face a black rose
closing do you know
what it’s like my boy my
boy you said sweating above the jar
to be the only one hated the only
one the white enemy of your own
country your own
face the trees they were roaring
above us red leaves leaving little cuts
in the sky gently I touched
your elbow the fish swirling
in their gone merry-go-round
sightless eyes no no Ma I said
holding my breath I don’t know
what it’s like & turned
my head up toward the sun
which brightly cancels
if you’re reading this then
I survived my life into yours
you who told your brother you were hungry
so he stole a roasted chicken
so he tucked it under his sky
-blue shirt & it’s not
your fault reader you had
to work you had to get up
in the blood-blue dawn to warm
up your car you who held
instant coffee with both hands
ate your lunch of Wonder Bread dipped
in condensed milk in the parking lot
alone you bought me pencils reader I could
not speak so I wrote myself into
silence where I stood waiting for you Ma
to read me do you read me now do you
copy mayday mayday you who dreamed
of dipping shreds of chicken
into fish sauce as you hid in the caves
above your village you white
devil girl starving ghost
but I shouldn’t have been so
hungry you said looking up
at the leaves vermilion through the brother
-blue sky I hated my hunger the veins
on your fists the jar all amber crush
empty as a word
-less mind stop writing
about your mother they said
but I can never take out
the rose it blooms back as my own
pink mouth how
can I tell you this when you’re always
to the right of meaning
as it pushes you further into white
space how can I say the hole
in your brother’s back is not
a part of your brother but your brother
aparted who is still somewhere
running because I wrote it
in the present tense the bullet held
just behind his death an insect
trapped in amber the charred
chicken clutched to his chest dust
rising from sandals
as he sprints toward the future
where you’re waiting by the rain
-warped window wet footsteps
on Risley Rd but dear reader
it’s only your son coming home
again after school after
the bullies put his face in brown
dirt what if I said the fastest
finger pointing to you Ma
is me would you look away
I point to you no no I went right
through you left a pink rose blazing
in the middle of the hospital
in Sài Gòn reader who
cannot read
or write you wrote a son
into the world with no
words but a syllable so much
like a bullet its heat fills you
today a Thursday
(ours not Vallejo’s) partly
cloudy a little wind I
kneel to write
our names on the sidewalk
& wait for the letters to
signal a future an
arrow pointing to a way
out I stare & stare
until it grows too dark to
read the ant & his brother long
home by now night
flooding the concrete black
my arms dim as incomplete
sentences reader I’ve
plagiarized my life
to give you the best
of me & these words these
insects anchovies
bullets salvaged & exiled
by art Ma my art these
corpses I lay
side by side on
the page to tell you
our present tense
was not too late
Woodworking at the End of the World
In a field, after everything, a streetlamp
shining on a patch of grass.
Having just come back to life, I lay down under its warmth
& waited for a way.
That’s when the boy appeared, lying next to me.
He was wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt
from another era, the colors faraway.
I recognized his eyes: black buttons salvaged from the coat
I used to cover my mother’s face, at the end.
Why do you exist? I wanted to know.
I felt the crickets around us but couldn’t hear them.
A chapel on the last day of war.
That’s how quiet he was.
The town I had walked from was small & American.
If I stayed on my knees, it would keep all my secrets.
When we heard the woodcutters coming closer, destroying
the past to build the future, the boy started to cry.
But the voice, the voice that came out
was an old man’s.
I reached into my pocket
but the gun was gone.
I must’ve dropped it while burying my language
farther up the road.
It’s okay, the boy said at last. I forgive you.
Then he kissed me as if returning a porcelain shard
to my cheek.
Shaking, I turned to him. I turned
& found, crumpled on the grass, the faded red shirt.
I put it over my face & stayed very still—like my mother
at the end.
Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free.
Notes & Acknowledgments
The epigraph on page ix is from César Vallejo’s “Agape.” The Black Heralds, Lima Penitentiary printing press, 1919. Translated by Rebecca Seiferle, Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
In “The Last Dinosaur” the configuration “How once, after weeks of drought” is borrowed from Eduardo C. Corral’s poem, “Our Completion: Oil on Wood: Tino Rodríguez: 1999.”
“The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica”: The lines “The sky flashes. The sea / yearns” and “I myself / am hell. Everyone’s here” are lifted and altered from John Berryman and Robert Lowell, respectively.
“Not Even” refers to a line from Lil Peep’s “Star Shopping.”
“The Punctum” was inspired by artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series: Ken Gonzales-Day, Erased Lynchings, 2006, fifteen inkjet prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum, museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2012.12.2A-O, © 2006, Ken Gonzales-Day.
“Dear Rose”: The epigraph is from Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.
Deep gratitude to the following journals, in which some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in different forms and titles: The Adroit Journal, The Believer, Boston Review, Brick, Freeman’s, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, INQUE, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poets.org, and The Yale Review.
An early version of “Dear T” first appeared in No (YesYes Books, 2013), a limited-edition chapbook, now out of print.
Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation and the United States Artist Fellowship for generous time and support. And to the Emily Dickinson Museum, who kindly offered time to write in Dickinson’s room, where “Nothing” was first drafted.
To the perennial ships in the night who helped make this book possible and ushered these poems toward their strongest versions, thank you: Peter Bienkowski, Frances Coady, Eduardo C. Corral, Laura Cresté, Peter Gizzi, Ann Godoff, Ben Lerner, Meghan O’Rourke, Jiyun Yun, and the ace team at Penguin.
About the Author
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius Grant," he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
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Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother
