You arrive at the edge
of a continent, the sea spreads
before you, an emerald expanse of wanting.
The cancer has divested you
the burden of hair and hunger.
For years you have been fading
into dust, into air.
Who to speak of, or to, when the names before you
are etched into stones, or curled in threads of smoke,
when there are no secrets left to burn?
Waves shatter incessantly,
bathing your feet in wreaths of ivory foam.
This is why you came: to feel the salt-spray
sizzle in your crevices,
the resurrection of withered nerves
igniting across your face.
You slip from your clothes, colors
unravel like petals. Naked,
you appear primordial, almost pure,
nothing but flesh, bones, a bit of light,
a man, a woman unconquered
by country, by anthems, by name.
You enter, the current pulls,
each grain of sand lets you go
as if all which exists must depart.
Caught by instinct, you begin to swim,
a surge of movement, limbs
like sprigs of light in so much darkness.
There has always been music
when you close your eyes, but now,
only the tide’s soft clapping
against skin as you descend
into the final steps.
The sea consumes you
save for your eyes, staring into an ember sliver
in the distance. When it rises, all will remain
is a dance between water and gravity,
unchanged since the first warm throat
bellowed against sky.
And what sickness, what law can claim
this ceremony, this constant depiction
of impermanence? If only we all had the luxury
of dying into oceans, we would know
how the tide sweeps the steps we’ve pressed
in searching, waves retrieving
the indentations of broken bodies.
The shores of our lives once more a slate,
smooth as the mind
before conception.
As if no one, not even God
was here.

Ocean Vuong was born in 1988 in Saigon Vietnam and he currently resides in NYC as a Creative Writing student at Brooklyn College. His work had appeared in the North Central Review, the Barnwood Press Review, the Connecticut River Review, Convergence, Ganymede, GHOTI, WordRiot, Poetalk, and the Blue Print Review among others. He is also a writer/editor for the Vietnam Literature project in the aspiration to promote and support the works of Vietnamese authors. He is currently completing a manuscript for his first chapbook titled, “Arrival by Fire.”