On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed.

but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

miss you more than I remember you.

Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth?

The Greeks thought sex was the attempt of two bodies, separated long ago, to return to one life.

The Vietnamese I own is the one you gave me, the one whose diction and syntax reach only the second-grade level.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.

Even if color is nothing but what the light reveals, that nothing has laws, and a boy on a pink bike must learn, above all else, the law of gravity.