Mar 17, 2025
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I try to live in black and white, but I'm so blue.
Palermo, Sicily.
Once, a man named a thing beautiful and so we wore it, buried it, turned it into currency.
Somewhere, maybe here, maybe now, I stand completely still until he looks in my direction.
Sometimes I don’t believe I exist until someone calls me beautiful.
Sometimes any warm thing will do.
Sometimes it’s me, a warm thing in the low light. Beautiful is what the man called me after he did what he wanted with — I’m running out of ways to describe it— my body, my silence.
Beautiful.
Why, I ask, in order to love yourself must you, first, be loved?
A bone sucked clean of its marrow.
A trail of ants magnified into ash.
And of course, I’m asking no one.
And of course, I know the answer.
Of course, I know it’s not me they’re looking for, the men, I mean.
And I wished he didn’t feel the need to speak, really wished — like me— he just kept quiet, but no, he had to speak, he had to say…Beautiful.
And now, my body appears, trapped in the long tunnel of a telescope.
And now I am here attending the aftermath of my own ruin, with nothing but beautiful to keep me company.
Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.
Maybe he was talking to himself. Maybe beautiful, as in good job,
as in look what I just did with my own two hands.
Staying Quiet
BY HIEU MINH NGUYEN
Florence and The Machine, Manchester 2023
Dance Fever Tour