In Prose We Are Briefly Brilliant
Ocean Vuong. A name, a line of syllables I connect in my brain. A movement of my mouth, my vocal chords, perhaps even my jaw if I were to say it across a crowded cafe. I hope I have the chance.
When my mother opened her legs and I came out, I don't think she imagined her daughter would one day aspire to write prose poetry. When she moved us to a small town on the east coast, uprooting her daughters and her entire life, later resenting our existence for doing so, did she imagine I'd spin words into fables, letters into sentences, creating space for both of our resentment, an intertwining of fates that goes beyond strands of DNA. The word 'family' is synonymous with love for most people, but for me, I've had to learn to unwind the strands and start writing my own sentences.
Ocean Vuong wrote a book called, "On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous." It's the kind of literature you didn't know you needed until you read it, lifting the pages up and away into agony, each line evaporating into my brain and becoming something I can't read again for the first time. I found it in a book store in the town over from where I live, in what a passerby declared is the best bookstore in the world. In the world. But it's not dramatic if it's true. I think when I look for books, I search for prose poetry, not only because that's the style I aspire to write in myself, but because its drama is true to the point of being too raw, too real, and therefore too enticing to turn away from.
I was looking for a different book when I saw it. I had been going backwards, starting with the end of the alphabet and scanning the shelves for an author with a last name somewhere near V, but not quite that letter. I think it was the cover art that drew me in, or maybe it's placement, a staff member had put it facing out and had a synopsis of the book written in bad cursive in front of it. But as I type this (and isn't that what writing is? discovering truths as we go), I'm realizing it was the title: extremely poetic and therefore intriguing, like remembering a line from a good poem when you didn't know you had remembered it at all.
After I bought it, I walked over to my favorite Mexican restaurant, the one with the bar out back, the one with the skylight, my seat by the pillar in the middle, the bartender who knows I want a prickly pear mocktail. I opened the book and did not devour it, did not enjoy it. Instead, I savored it, was horrified by the images it struck up in me like a match playing with heat, putting my hand over my mouth at certain points in wonder, the bartender looking over at me with a brief look of concern at my sudden movement, as if a book can't move us to action.
Ocean Vuong lives in my hometown. The one my mother resents either herself or her daughters for moving to, the one I love with my poor, sorry, relentless heart. I had opened to the back flap, had read his tragically short bio. I believe it's in the first line - and indeed, why not open cold, why not shatter my heart into pieces upon the realization we both love the frostbitten cold of its winters, the lushness of its springtimes, the sweat pouring from both our skin in too much humidity?
I don't live there anymore. I actually moved away because of the seasons. I moved to California to escape what I had in fact loved, to escape family, to escape my definition of love. I had taken away my heart to protect it in the sun, and here, at this Mexican bar on the sunny west coast, I realized that with Ocean Vuong's prose poetry, home had been transported to right where I was seated near the pillar under the skylight.
I want to meet Ocean Vuong at a cafe and ask him about his process. What lead him to write, to publish. Why poetry? How to make it so incredibly breathtaking? I know this is a fantasy, as I'm writing this, as I'm realizing truths come out as we write. Ocean Vuong spun truth. Writers, perhaps, all spin truths. Ocean Vuong had reached out through language, had opened his own heart, and we had touched briefly, just a quickly as a poem, with a fleeting brilliance that evaporates like the ability to read prose for the first time.