Ocean Vuong

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome 
 
                        I watched you
from the window’s warped pane.
The tulip dissolving
in your palm, its petals splayed
like battered ships.
 
Evening light melting
into cloudspine: excruciating
only because it can’t
be touched. Can’t,
like the body, be shackled
with words.
 
Am I a coward, then,
to turn away
from this window, to prefer
the memory, although fading,
to what’s possible
with hands?
 
To know the date of one’s demise,
is to know every word
for beauty. There are as many as the kisses
we’ve crushed to our lips
in prayer.
 
Unbearable, I entered the yard, took
those withered petals from your palm,
placed them one by one inside
my mouth.
 
And there we stood: two shadows
cleaved with a blade of amber,
waiting for night, oh glorious night
to mend us.
 
 
 
 
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is currently an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has received an Academy of American Poets prize, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in RHINO, diode, Verse Daily, The Collagist, Crate, and PANK, among others. He keeps a blog www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com
 
 
 
 
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