Ocean Vuong

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong is the author of the chapbook BURNINGS (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010) and is currently an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He was a semi-finalist for the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and has received an Academy of American Poets award, the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award, as well as four Pushcart Prize nominations. Poems appear in RHINO, diode, Lantern Review, The Collagist, Crate, and PANK, among others. He keeps a blog at www.oceanvuong.blogspot.com

Poetry by Ocean Vuong

Despite Everything, My Dancers

Ocean Vuong - May 14, 2012

Despite Everything, My Dancers
By Ocean Vuong

He takes her hand and they step
into bomb crater. Look how they shuffle
and sway in its moon-bruised shade.
All around them the crickets.
Saigon shimmering beyond the road
swept blue with dust. Their faces beaming
the way youth beams in its thrill
of falling. As if through the hips' twisted
caesuras, the body's history can
be exorcised, can, like umbilical cords,
be buried in a field where the dead
resurrect in spring's greenest shoots.