You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now
told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god's
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to survive, which means you are somebody's

son. Which means if you open your eyes, you'll be back
in that house, beneath a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

Your mother's boyfriend, his bald head ringed with red
hair, like a planet on fire, kneeling

by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed
Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned

from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand
on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield-

motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light
beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth

spinning in no one's orbit. & you want someone to say Hey...Hey
I think your dancing is gorgeous. A little waltz to die for,

darling. You want someone to say all this
is long ago. That one night, very soon, you'll pack a bag

with your favorite paperback & your mother's .45,
that the surest shelter was always the thoughts

above your head. That it's fair-it has to be-
how our hands hurt us, then give us

the world. How you can love the world
until there's nothing left to love

but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away-back into the fog

-walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you
to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing

& still breathing. Believe me.


About this poem
"I think when I write, I often write to the terrified versions of myself-which, for whatever reason, makes me think of fire escapes. What if a poem was all fire escape and no building, all bones for departure? Maybe this poem is a fire escape. Maybe some fire escapes are carried inside us."
-Ocean Vuong

About Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is the author of "Night Sky With Exit Wounds" (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). He lives in Queens, N.Y.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Ocean Vuong. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate