Ocean Vuong Quotes

I don't know / desire other than the need / to be shattered & rebuilt

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

I didn't know the cost
of entering a song - was to lose
your way back.

If Mario fell off, he would have to start the level over, from the beginning. This was also called dying.

Stupid boy,
You can get lost in every book
but you can never forget yourself
the way god forgets
his hands.

They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, "raw," and empty. They will speak of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. They will tell you that great writing "breaks free" from the political, thereby "transcending" the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They'll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let's see how it's made, they'll say- as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

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, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled
with blood thin as a widow's
tears. I am ready. I am ready
to be every animal
you leave behind.

To ask 'What's good?' was to move, right away, to joy. It was pushing aside what was inevitable to reach the exceptional. Not great or well or wonderful, but simply good. Because good was more often enough, was a precious spark we sought and harvested of and for one another.

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 my life was more of it?

Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

it cannot keep. That this amber light
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand
to your chest."

"On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

A pillaged village is a fine example of a perfect rhyme. He said that.

He was white. Or maybe, I was just beside myself, next to him.

Either way, I forgot his name by heart.

Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.

But some nothing's changed everything after them.

He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house.

I didn't know that would be the last time I'd see him, his neck scar lit blue by the diner's neon marquee. To see that little comma again, to put my mouth there, let my shadow widen the scar until, at last, there was no scar to be seen at all, just a vast and equal dark sealed by my lips. A comma superimposed by a period the mouth so naturally makes. Isn't that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.

Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you'd kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
like a sparrow stunned
with falling.

What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence - it's what makes us human, Ma, I swear. It lets us stop in order to keep going.
Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft,
whether he ascends or falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise
over.

I met a man tonight.... maybe I shouldn't have, but he had the hands of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.

My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world's smallest ambulances, going nowhere.

We try to preserve life, even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.

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 our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother's shadow falls.

Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.

Confetti
green, how I want you green.
Green despite the red despite
the rest.

Grandma said In the war they would grab a baby, a soldier at each ankle, and pull...
Just like that.

It's finally spring! Daffodils everywhere.
Just like that.

We rode home, the streetlights here and there above us. That day was a purple day-- neither good or bad, but something we passed through.

Lan, through her stories, was also traveling in a spiral. As I listened, there would be moments when the story would change-- not much, just a minuscule detail, the time of day, the color of someone's shirt, two air raids instead of three, an AK-47 instead of a 9mm, the daughter laughing, not crying. Shifts in narrative would occur-- the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.

Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven – waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just enough for us to slip through.

When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart...

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field-it was always there-where to be lost is never wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more.

use it to prove how the stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word

To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

To love another man is to leave no one behind to forgive me.

And this is how we danced: with our mothers'
white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. And this is how we loved:
a fifth of vodka and an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

sweeping though my hair - my hair a wildfire.
We covered our ears and your father's tantrum turned

into heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed
into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house.
There was always the shotgun above the fireplace.

Always another hour to kill - only to beg some god
to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not the car,

the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive,
put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we've traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how
we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

This is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning
into a tongue.

He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables

inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press
into her  -  as the field shreds itself

with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home
out of  hip bones. O mother,

O minutehand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst

holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body

like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.

Because he tasted like the river and maybe you were one wing away from sinking.

What are we if not what the light says we are?

Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn't be stuck down here.

I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was.

All this time I told myself we were born from war-- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but for that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.

We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another.

The most beautiful part of your body
is where it's headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.

The thing is, I don't want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don't want my happiness to be othered. They're both mine. I made them, dammit.

To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time.

I'll tell you how we're wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chain saw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. & so I learned - that a man in climax was the closest thing
to surrender.

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man
staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly
own the aisle. He leans against the door,

raises a violin to chin, and says I'm sorry
to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen.
And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music

should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover,
inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo
seeps through our skin like warm water, we

who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light
but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching.
Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses

on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord
exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me
has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby

has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know
this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws
will always open to swallow a smile already lost.

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 to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands

When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.

I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.

You once told me that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.

Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. in which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be the third language that animates where the tongue falters.

A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved.

Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.

That was the day I learned how dangerous a color can be. That a boy could be knocked off that shade and made to reckon his trespass. Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.

& so what–if my feathers
are burning. I
never asked for flight.

I hold the gun & wonder if an entry wound in the night would make a hole wide as morning

No, madam,' I said to the woman in my ESL English. "That's my mom. I came out her asshole and I love her very much. I am seven. Next year I will be eight. I'm doing fine."...
You believed, like many Vietnamese mothers, that to speak of female genitalia, especially between mothers adn sons, is considered taboo- so when talking about birth, you always mentioned that I had come out of your anus. You would playfully slap my head and say,'This huge noggin nearly tore up my asshole!

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.

[…] remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world.

from "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," The New Yorker: Poems. May 4, 2015 Issue.

Eurydice"

It's more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer to the rib's
hollowed hum. We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance. It's not
about the light - but how dark
it makes you depending
on where you stand.
Depending on where you stand
his name can appear like moonlight
shredded in a dead dog's fur.
His name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. We kept saying Yes -
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary.
But here we are - standing
in the cold field, him calling
for the girl. The girl
beside him. Frosted grass
snapping beneath her hooves.

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I stare instead, hands behind my back, from far away, sometimes even at the room's threshold, where everything is still possible because nothing is revealed.

He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him.

He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That's what I wanted - not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger. Then I wanted more, the scent, the atmosphere of him, the taste of French fries and peanut butter under the salve of his tongue, the salt around his neck from two hour drives to nowhere and a Burger King at the edge of the county, a day of tense talk with his old man, the rust from the electric razor he shared with that old man, how I would always find it on the sink in its sad plastic case, the tobacco, weed and cocaine smoke on his fingers mixed with motor oil, all of it accumulating into the afterscent of wood smoke caught and soaked in his hair, as if when he came to me, his mouth wet and wanting, he came from a place on fire, a place he could never return to.

We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.

We made it, baby.
We're riding in the back of the black
limousine. They have lined
the road to shout our names.
They have faith in your golden hair
& pressed grey suit.
They have a good citizen
in me. I love my country.
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I pretend not to see the man
& his blond daughter diving
for cover, that you're not saying
my name & it's not coming out
like a slaughterhouse.
I'm not Jackie O yet
& there isn't a hole in your head, a brief
rainbow through a mist
of rust. I love my country
but who am I kidding? I'm holding
your still-hot thoughts in,
darling, my sweet, sweet
Jack. I'm reaching across the trunk
for a shard of your memory,
the one where we kiss & the nation
glitters. Your slumped back.
Your hand letting go. You're all over
the seat now, deepening
my fuchsia dress. But I'm a good
citizen, surrounded by Jesus
& ambulances. I love
this country. The twisted faces.
My country. The blue sky. Black
limousine. My one white glove
glistening pink - with all
our American dreams.

Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in the season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.

Have you ever made a scene,' you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade house, 'and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?'

How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two different pages, merging?

Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us. If I enjoy a poem, that just means I am recognizing within it something of myself, something I must already possess. Therefore, to love a poem is to love a part of myself revealed to me by another person…

I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again...

To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That's what I was.

Because something in him know she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

...sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable... one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

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.

What is a country, but a life sentence?

I don't know if I believe this but that's what it felt like: As if we were to people mining one body, and in doing so, merged, until no corner was left saying I.

When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote begin with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe. But my doubt is everywhere. Even when I know something to be true I fear the knowledge will dissolve, will not, despite my writing it, stay real.

It's like when all you've been seeing before you is a cliff and then this bright bridge appears out of nowhere, and you run fast across it knowing, sooner or later, there'll be another cliff on the other side. What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: you don't have to be like the buffaloes.
You can stop.

A new immigrant, within two years, will come to know that the salon is, in the end, a place where dreams become the calcified knowledge of what it means to be awake in American bones - with or without citizenship - aching, toxic, and underpaid.

I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.