A scar’s width of warmth on a worn man’s neck.
That’s all I wanted to be.
Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.
Discovery: My longest pubic hair is 1.2 inches.
7:18 a.m. Kevin overdosed last night. His sister left a message.
Couldn’t listen to all of it. That makes three this year.
Spilled orange juice all over the table this morning. Sudden sunlight I couldn’t wipe away.
All through the night my hands were daylight.
Woke at 1 a.m and, for no reason, ran through Duffy’s cornfield.
Corn was dry. I sounded like a fire,
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.
There are over 13,000 unidentified body parts from the World Trade Center being stored in an underground repository in New York City.
Shouldn’t heaven be superheavy by now?
Maybe the rain is ‘sweet’ because it falls
through so much of the world.
Even sweetness can scratch the throat, so stir sugar well. - Grandma
4:37 a.m. How come depression makes me feel more alive?
Note to self: If a guy tells you his favorite poet is Jack Kerouac,
there’s a very good chance he’s a douchebag.
Note to self: If Orpheus were a woman I wouldn’t be stuck down here.
Why do all my books leave me empty-handed?
In Vietnamese, the word for grenade is ‘bom’, from the French ‘pomme’, meaning ‘apple’.
Or was it American for ‘bomb’?
Woke up screaming with no sound. The room was filling with a bluish water called dawn. Went to kiss grandma on the forehead
An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.
9:47 a.m. Jerked off four times already. My arm kills.
Eggplant = cà pháo = ‘grenade tomato’. Thus nourishment
I met a man tonight. A high school English teacher
from the next town. A small town. Maybe
I shouldn’t have, but he had the hands
of someone I used to know. Someone I was used to.
The way they formed brief churches
over the table as he searched for the right words.
I met a man, not you. In his room the Bibles shook on the shelf from candlelight. His scrotum is a bruised fruit. I kissed it
lightly, the way one might kiss a grenade
before hurling it into the night’s mouth.
Maybe the tongue is also a key.
I could eat you he said, brushing my cheek with his knuckles.
I think I love my mom very much.
Some grenades explode with a vision of white flowers.
Baby’s breath blooming in a darkened sky, across
Maybe the tongue is also a pin.
I’m gonna lose it when Whitney Houston dies.
I met a man. I promise to stop.
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.
I wonder what it feels like to move at the speed of thirst - if it’s fast like lying on the kitchen floor with the lights off.
6.24 a.m. Greyhound station. One-way ticket to New York City: $36.75
6:57 a.m. I love you, mom.
When the prison guards burned his manuscripts, Nguyên Chí Thięn couldn’t stop laughing - the 238 poems already inside him.
I dreamed I walked barefoot all the way to your house in the snow. Everything was the blue of smudged ink
and you were still alive. There was even a light the shade of sunrise inside your window.
God must be a season, grandma said, looking out at the blizzard drowning her garden.
My footsteps on the sidewalk were the smallest flights.
Dear god, if you are a season, let it be the one I passed through to get here.
Here. That’s all I wanted to be.
- Notebook Fragments, Ocean Vuong
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