Sep 8, 2014
5 Min read time
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Congratulations to Ocean Vuong, 2014 recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. Read "Ode to Masturbation" and "Into the Breach" below.
I met Ocean Vuong through the poems he read one night at Manhattan’s Bureau of General Services–Queer Division. While Vuong’s words struck me as delicate, even simple, their impact was gut-clenching, soul-piercing. His lines are like careful calipers opening us, each to each, as he bears out a heaviness meant not to hold us down but to unveil the magma underlying the presumption of life: just as light is both particle and wave, or as the human body is composed of more microbes than human cells, that which animates isn’t just one thing, it isn’t simply a life force—it is also decay. We are elements in motion that are not-us.
Vuong distills ideas. We steep in them. This is one way to open the world. Digging down in the dirt of it reveals that the heat emitted by rot is the engine of living’s mechanisms. “Ode to Masturbation” exemplifies a sensual unearthing that permits us slow-motion glances at the currents at work, holding us together as political (“lips like money / laramie jasper / & sanford towns”), desirous (“every rib / humming / the desperation / of unstruck / piano keys”), historical (“hard facts / gathering / the memory of rust”), spiritual (“the lord cut you / here / to remind us / where he came from”), and elemental (“you scrape the salt / off the cunt-cock / & call it / daylight”). We are nothing if not everything resonating, distant and unified by distance, the primordial soup of Vuong’s cum shot as “an articulation / of chewed stars.” This type of blasphemy illuminates “the if under every / utterance” that will save us from our certainties and enable us toward what we thought was elsewhere in the universe—like the light of dead stars emerging from ourselves.
—Amy King
Ode to Masturbation
in your mouth
water shook
like sparks
as they pulled
you up
& sometimes
your hand
is all you have
to hold
yourself
to this world
because it’s
the sound
not the prayer
that enters
the thunder not
the lightning
that wakes you
in lonely midnight
sheets holy
water smeared
between your thighs
where no man
ever drowned
from too much
thirst & when
is the cumshot not
an articulation
of chewed stars
go ahead—lift
the sugar-
crusted thumb
& teach
the tongue
of unbridled
nourishment
to be lost in
an image
is to find within it
a door so close
your eyes
down with every rib
humming
the desperation
of unstruck
piano keys
human some call this
walking but
you already know
it’s the briefest form
of flight yes even
the saints
remember this
the if under every
utterance
beneath
the breath brimmed
like cherry blossoms
foaming into no one’s
springtime
how often these lines
resemble claw marks
of your brothers
being dragged
away from you
you whose name
not heard
by the ear
but the smallest bones
in the graves you
who ignite the april air
with all your petals’
here here here who
twist through
despite knowing
how color beckons
decapitation
i reach down
looking for you
in american dirt
in towns with names
like hope
celebration
success & sweet
lips like money
laramie jasper
& sanford towns
whose trees know
the weight of history
can bend their branches
to breaking
lines whose roots burrow
through stones
& hard facts
gathering
the memory of rust
& iron
mandibles
& amethyst yes
touch yourself
like this part
the softest wound’s
unhealable
hunger
after all
the lord cut you
here
to remind us
pin this antlered
body back
to earth
cry out
each faceless
beast banished
from the ark
as you scrape the salt
off the cunt-cock
& call it
don’t
to be this
illuminated
to be so bright
& empty
the bullets pass
right through
thinking
they have reached
the sky
as you press
your hand
to a blood-warm
body
like a word
to its meaning
& lives
Into the Breach
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Boston Review’s Black Voices in the Public Sphere Fellowship is designed to address the profound lack of diversity in the media by providing aspiring Black media professionals with training, mentorship, networking opportunities, and career development workshops. The program is being funded with the generous support of Derek Schrier, chair of Boston Review’s board of advisors, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, but we still have $50,000 left to raise to fully fund the fellowship for the next two years. To help reach that goal, if you make a tax-deductible donation to our fellowship fund through August 31 it will be matched 1:1, up to $25,000—so please act now to double your impact. To learn more about the program and our 2021-2022 fellows, click here.
September 08, 2014
5 Min read time
