Ocean Vuong (born Vương Quốc Vinh, born October 14, 1988) is a Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist. He is the recipient of the 2014 Ruth Lilly/Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, 2016 Whiting Award, and the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize. His debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was published in 2019. He received a MacArthur Grant that same year.
AUBADE WITH BURNING CITY
Ocean Vuong
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
Milkflower petals on the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright …
He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps
fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all
your Christmases be white as the traffic guard
unstraps his holster.
His hand running the hem
of her white dress.
His black eyes.
Her black hair.
A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.
A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.
On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.
The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.
The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white … A white … I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow
falling from her shoulders.
Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink.
The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice
cracking.
Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow …
The lights go out.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming …
to hear sleigh bells in the snow …
In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god —
Open, he says.
She opens.
=====
DEVOTION
Ocean Vuong
Instead, the year begins
with my knees
scraping hardwood,
another man leaving
into my throat. Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet
I’ve shut out for good.
Because the difference
between prayer & mercy
is how you move
the tongue. I press mine
to the navel’s familiar
whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
devotion. & there’s nothing
more holy than holding
a man’s heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
with too much
air. This mouth the last
entry into January, silenced
with fresh snow crackling
on the window.
& so what––if my feathers
are burning. I
never asked for flight.
Only to feel
this fully, this
entire, the way snow
touches bare skin––& is,
suddenly, snow
no longer.
=====
DETONATION
Ocean Vuong
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
To even write the word father
is to carve a portion of the day
out of a bomb-bright page.
There’s enough light to drown in
but never enough to enter the bones
& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy
broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry
anymore. So I ran into the night.
The night: my shadow growing
toward my father.