Seeing as It Is
Poetry by Ocean Vuong
In the hospital room’s white
indifference, a small girl waits
while gloved hands unravel layers
of gauze from her eyes.
She will see for the first time
the objects we’ve limited
through naming. The gauze falls,
light enters her pupils, diffracts
like ribbons falling
in an empty room.
She steps to the window
where a city sparkles a million
reflections of sunlight. And there,
against the morning skyline,
a plane veers, smashes into
that great tower. Without a sound,
a breath of fire spews
into immaculate blue.
Each flame a blossom rising
into slow rivers of smoke.
She imagines that this
is the image of music
as she presses her nose to the glass
and says without blinking Mommy,
you were right. This world
is beautiful.
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong currently resides in New York City as an undergraduate English Major at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His poems have received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beatrice Dubin Rose Award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as two Pushcart Prize nominations. His work appear in Word Riot, the Kartika Review, Lantern Review, SOFTBLOW, Asia Literary Review, and PANK among others. He enjoys practicing Zen Meditation and is an avid supporter of animal rights. More poems at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com
[...] Splinter Generation, Ocean Vuong’s poetry will delight [...]
Damn. He’s good.
This is definitely one of the strongest writers I’ve come across in a while. His work is brave and just fucking good poetry. I heard he’s a bit crazy though–apparently he got high at a party once and urinated off a rooftop in Brooklyn while reciting Whitman? (my source was pretty trustworthy. You can’t make this up).