Ocean Vuong

For Tamir Rice
yellow plastic
black sea
eye-shaped shard

i
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows

Hey.
I used to be a fag now I’m a checkbox.
The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.
I will not dance alone in the municipal graveyard at midnight, blasting sad

Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand-in-hand,
into the bomb crater. The night full
of  black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing
flickering in black mud
was a word
stranded by its language.

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.