Safiya Sinclair Ocean Vuong

POETRY

Safiya Sinclair

Home

Have I forgotten it— wild conch-shell dialect,

black apostrophe curled tight on my tongue?

Or how the Spanish built walls of broken glass to keep me out

but the Doctor Bird kept chasing and raking me in: This place

is your place, wreathed in red Sargassum, ancient driftwood

nursed on the pensive sea. The ramshackle altar I visited

often, packed full with fish-skull, bright with lignum vitae plumes:

Father, I have asked so many miracles of it. To be patient and forgiving,

to be remade for you in some small wonder. And what a joy to still believe in anything. My diction now as straight

as my hair; that stranger we’ve long stopped searching for.

But if somehow our half-sunken hearts could answer, I would cup

my mouth in warm bowls over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt

of home, taste Bogue-mud and one long orange peel for skin.

I’d open my ear for sugar cane and long stalks of gungo peas

to climb in. I’d swim the sea still lapsing in a soldered frame,

the sea that again and again calls out my name.

Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda

I too am gathering the vulgarity of botany, the eye and its nuclei for mischief.

Of Man, redacted I came, am coming, fasting, starving carved

myself a selfish idol, its shell unsuitable. I, twice discarded, arrived thornside, and soon outgrew

his reptilian sheen. A fine specimen. Let me have it. Something inviolate; splayed in bird-lime,

legs an exposed anemone, against jailbait August, its X-ray sky. This light a Gorgon-slick, polygamous

doom. And God again calling much too late, who aches to stick an ache in my unmentionable.

His Primal Plant remains elusive—

Wildfire and pathogen, blood-knot of human

fleshed there in His beard. How I am hot for it. Call me murderess, a glowing engine

timed to blow. Watch it go with unjealousy, shadow. Let me have it. This maidenhead-primeval

schemes what ovule of cruel invention; the Venus-trap, the menses.

And how many ways to announce this guilt: whore’s nest of ague, supernova, wild stigmata.

Womb. I boast a vogue sacrosanctum. Engorging shored pornographies, the cells’ unruly

strain, rogue empire multiplying for a thousand virile thousand years; my wings pinned wide

SAFIYA SINCLAIR was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her debut collection, Cannibal, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2015, and will be published by University of Nebraska Press in 2016. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Callaloo, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and was the winner of the Boston Review’s eighteenth annual poetry contest. Sinclair received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, and is currently completing a PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California.

POETRY

Ocean Vuong

Telemachus

Like any good son, I pull my father out of the water, drag him by his hair

through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

beyond the shore is no longer where we left it. Because the bombed

cathedral is now a cathedral of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

I might sink. Do you know who I am, Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming with seawater. He is so still I think

he could be anyone’s father, found the way a green bottle might appear

at a boy’s feet containing a year he has never touched. I touch

his ears. No use. I turn him over. To face it. The cathedral

in his sea-black eyes. The face not mine—but one I will wear

to kiss all my lovers good-night: the way I seal my father’s lips

with my own & begin the faithful work of drowning.

OCEAN VUONG holds a BA from Brooklyn College and will complete an MFA from NYU in 2016. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and TheAmerican Poetry Review. He has published two chapbooks, No (2013) and Burnings (2010); his first full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2016. Vuong is the recipient of a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is originally from Saigon and lives in New York City.

Homewrecker

& this is how we danced: our mothers’ white dresses spilling from our feet, late August

turning our hands dark red. & this is how we loved: a fifth of vodka & an afternoon in the attic, your fingers

through my hair—my hair a wildfire. We covered our ears & your father’s tantrum turned

to heartbeats. When our lips touched the day closed into a coffin. In the museum of the heart

there are two headless people building a burning house. There was always the shotgun above

the fireplace. Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god to give it back. If not the attic, the car. If not

the car, the dream. If not the boy, his clothes. If not alive, put down the phone. Because the year is a distance

we’ve traveled in circles. Which is to say: this is how we danced: alone in sleeping bodies. Which is to say:

this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.