Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes. Not necessarily swans, even crows, even the evening fusillade of bats. That place where the creek goes underground, how many weeks before I see you again? Stacks of books, every page, characters’ rages and poets’ strange contraptions of syntax and song, every song even when there isn’t one. Every thistle, splinter, butterfly over the drainage ditches. Every stray. Did you see the meteor shower? Did it feel like something swallowed? Every question, conversation even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud, because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds, confiding in a cat. Everyone says, Come to your senses, and I do, of you. Every touch electric, every taste you, every smell, even burning sugar, every cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples at the farmers’ market, every melon, plum, I come undone, undone.
quotes from ocean vuong’s poetry collection time is a mother, on shirts from peter do’s debut at helmut lang ss24. inspired by jenny holzer’s truisms series.
“She has the feeling, all her life, that she never makes sense. There is something else, big and dark, at the edge of what she knows, she cannot say. She always has the feeling she is translating into broken english. Language all her life is a second language, the first is mute & exists.”
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