Ode to Masturbation

Ode to Masturbation

By Ocean Vuong

Pearled semen trickles from vessel

as the silence of possibilities dries

on the floor and inside my palm.

Even now, as the body trembles

from the pleasure of its making,

somewhere, a plane

is pregnant with death.

When starlight sparkling 

on the surface of falling bombs

and flames turn muscle

into pompous, skin into ash,

the sound of a scream in mid-death,

straining to push the weight

of last words, can you blame the hand

for craving the softest parts?

Reach down, there is music

in the body, play yourself

like a lyre, insert the finger

into sanctum, feel

the quivering of crevices, skin 

palpitating ripples as if stretched

over drumbeats.

Reach down. Let explosions be muted

by climaxes, the Holy Water

between your thighs flow

into rivulets of cleansing, 

let it rinse the soil of drying blood.

Reach down, there is music

in the cunt, the cock,

the asshole. Grab your balls—

that grenade of white flowers.

Reach down as fathers destroy the sons

and daughters of other fathers,

as faces emerge from wombs

and exiled into memory.

Reach down as a thousand I love you's 

fail to reach the man caressing

the trigger's black tongue.

Because even now, in a city shimmering

from shards of broken halos, 

we are not holy, only beautiful.

Because even now as I kneel to wipe

this cooling pool of sperm,

down the hall—a man

is beating madness into a child's skull,

and not once will I ask

my unborn children

to forgive 

this hand. 

Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut and received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College.

He is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association's Over The Rainbow selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. He was the recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Connecticut Poetry Society's Al Savard Award. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Best of the Net 2012 and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize.