Ocean Vuong — Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds

Instead, let it be the echo to every footstep drowned out by rain, cripple the air like a name flung onto a sinking boat, splash the kapok's bark through rot & iron of a city trying to forget the bones beneath its sidewalks, then through the refugee camp sick with smoke & half-sung hymns, a shack rusted black & lit with Bà Ngoại’s last candle, the hogs' faces we held in our hands & mistook for brothers, let it enter a room illuminated with snow, furnished only with laughter, Wonder Bread & mayonnaise raised to cracked lips as tеstament to a triumph no one recalls, lеt it brush the newborn's flushed cheek as he’s lifted in his father's arms, wreathed with fishgut & Marlboros, everyone cheering as another brown gook crumbles under John Wayne's M16, Vietnam burning on the screen, let it slide through their ears, clean, like a promise, before piercing the poster of Michael Jackson glistening over the couch, into the supermarket where a Hapa woman is ready to believe every white man possessing her nose is her father, may it sing, briefly, inside her mouth, before laying her down between jars of tomato & blue boxes of pasta, the deep-red apple rolling from her palm, then into the prison cell where her husband sits staring at the moon until he's convinced it's the last wafer god refused him, let it hit his jaw like a kiss we've forgotten how to give one another, hissing back to '68, Ha Long Bay: the sky replaced with fire, the sky only the dead look up to, may it reach the grandfather fucking the pregnant farmgirl in the back of his army jeep, his blond hair flickering in napalm-blasted wind, let it pin him down to dust where his future daughters rise, fingers blistered with salt & Agent Orange, let them tear open his olive fatigues, clutch that name hanging from his neck, that name they press to their tongues to relearn the word live, live, live—but if for nothing else, let me weave this deathbeam the way a blind woman stitches a flap of skin back to her daughter's ribs. Yes—let me believe I was born to cock back this rifle, smooth & slick, like a true Charlie, like the footsteps of ghosts misted through rain as I lower myself between the sights—& pray that nothing moves.