Print This PostAfter Rapture
I am found kneeling
beneath the last
_____blasted tree. Winter
on my shoulders
and a sparrow’s red skull lodged
_____in my mouth.
I have cut my hair
to feed the fire. Remnants of a city
_____dusting my lips.
No nations left to die for
or hide in. Only this voice—
_____woven through the cracks
of a halved piano: that sound
a doe makes when the arrowhead
_____replaces the day
with an answer to the ribs’
quiet hollows. I reach
_____for the charred branch
and push. Blood dots the dust
beneath me. My wet face titled
_____skyward. I push until he starts
to crown, my name already dripping
from his lips. He writhes
_____through me, scraping
for that precious shard
of light, where the wolves
_____have already gathered—
their half-moon fangs
brightening the hour. But I push
_____anyway. I open. I wound. And you—
dear reader, you will call it
the beginning
_____of Adam. And I,
the fool who chose
to live, I will call it
_____forgiveness.
__________________________________________________
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was selected by the American Library Association’s “Over The Rainbow” list of recommended LGBT reading. He is a recipient of a Kundiman fellowship, a 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as six Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Verse Daily, RHINO, Southern Indiana Review, Guernica, South Dakota Review, and Passages North, amongst others. He keeps a blog at www.oceanvuong.tumblr.com
