Burning House

for Peter

We have sinned, but remain
beautiful. And now
this house is burning. Their torches rain
like the fragments of a shattered sun.
Their eyes glisten through
the flame’s curved fingers.

Let them see us, framed through what’s left
of windows, the way we expire—
fingers re-learning flesh
for the last time, our bodies
wrapped in this throne of arms
while the pictures we hung are bursting
into golden blossoms of memory.

I want to burn haloed with your scent,
wreathed in vestiges of your fading.
As each flame igniting on your skin
meets my tongue, you tell me
our story, of the phoenixes
who flew without feathers, you speak
until your voice is no more
than the crackling of burning bones.

And when these walls collapse, cascading
in streams of ash and shadows,
they will find us here:
smoldered shells shrouded
in red feathers, my tongue crumbling
in my lover’s mouth.

What Light Cannot Reveal

Love,
there are things I can only say in the dark.
How one spring I crushed a monarch in mid-flight
just to know how it felt
                                     to have something beautiful
         end in my hands.

Here are those hands. Feel them tremble when touched
          by music.
Hands calloused from holding on to everything
that fades: scent of lilac, a fragment of dawn
           in the eye of a dead dog, your voice
on the verge of bursting
                                         into promise.

Hands that pressed the glock to that boy’s temple
when the deal went wrong. How through his soft prayers,
my fingers grew slick on the trigger.

Love,
I let the boy return to the night, but I don’t know much
       about mercy, only
       that there is no hunger like the need
       to be shattered
                                      and rebuilt. 
That for two weeks
I walked those graffitied streets searching for his face,
trying to return the hat he dropped
                            when fleeing from my ruin.

As if that was enough: to give something back
to the ones we could’ve taken away,
as if wounds heal faster when we forget
                                               their cause.
Love,
there are things I can only say in the dark
           where I cannot see
you are missing, where the monarchs
no longer come, and these hands
                                                  no longer mine.

               Grief

                              I

               Evening.

               I look into the frame

               of my window

               for your moon

               but see instead

               a streetlamp

               lighting the corpse

               of a murdered city.

                              II

               After the storm, earthworms
               writhe on sidewalk.
               Night, too slow in coming
               will not save them.
               The crow’s foot
               already twitching
               on the bough.

               The calendar
               has been January
               for months. Its edges
               the shade of urine.
               I step outside
               to look for your face
               in the raindrops pearling
               on my nose.

               The sky is clear.

Ocean Vuong emigrated to the U.S. in 1990 at the age of one and is currently an undergraduate student at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appear or are forthcoming in the Connecticut River Review, Word Riot, PANK, Asian American Poetry and SOFTBLOW among others. He is also a volunteer writer for the Vietnam Literature Project in the aspiration to support and promote the works of Vietnamese authors. He enjoys going streaking in cornfields and practicing Zen Mediation. He lives with an 84 year old roommate in Brooklyn, New York.