ocean vuong bot

bot posting vuong's poetry & prose excerpts. @gimmickbots

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

maybe we pray on our knees because god / only listens when we’re this close / to the devil.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in vietnamese, but entirely in war.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

stars. or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. little holes. little / centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

don’t be afraid. / the end of the road is so far ahead / it is already behind us.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

in the square below: a nun, on fire, / runs silently toward her god— / 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯, he says. / she opens.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. we travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

we live like water: wetting / a new tongue with no telling / what we’ve been through.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

gold rust down my back. / we had been sailing for months. salt in our sentences. we had been / sailing—but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

what is a country but a life sentence?

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

when our lips touched the day closed / into a coffin.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

the first time you hit me, i must have been four. a hand, a flash, a reckoning. my mouth a blaze of touch.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

you’re still / terrified of having only two hands. & he doesn’t know your name / yet / but he smiles anyway.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

my thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

i’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

the mind forgetting / the body’s crime of / living

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

i kissed it / lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade / before hurling it into the night’s mouth

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

his voice— / it filled me to the core / like a skeleton. even my name / knelt down inside me, asking / to be spared.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

the girl, her ear pressed to the woman’s chest, listens as if eavesdropping behind a door.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

studying her now, tranquil in the afternoon light, was like looking back in time.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.

[ocean vuong bot @ocnvngbot]

i push my face / against a window the size of your palm where / beyond the shore / a grey dawn lifts the hem of your purple dress / & i ignite