To know it only as a photograph, a memory.
Never to witness again a community of millions clustered 
on Eucalyptus branches, now empty.
These fragile slivers of stained glass
no longer clinging to winter respites.
What is a world that would allow
this extravagant pollinator to die off?
This migrational miracle. 
Rumi says, You were born 
with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?
I want a humanity that weeps 
copiously for this animal who starts off 
in a crawl, shows us how to fly. I want
processions, dirges everywhere,
want to howl over milkweed, bereft, without 
purpose. So much loss. I want to rend my garments.
Burn kaleidoscopes of butterflies into my skin.
What good would that do? Or I could slice
open the sky, so their ghosts torrent down. 

What do I know of softness—my origins 
in an ice-house, in a tradition of cruelty,
of abhorration, torn appendages. Where
are the wings for this? Where the flashes 
of orange slipped through our fingers?

The only place I have to hide is inside my poems.
		Ocean Vuong in an interview on February 18, 2016

So many clouds 
and the feeling of rain.
But nothing pours.

Everything shrivels.
So dry, the earth, begs

the sky to squeeze a few
drops out of its mouth.
So dry, trees gasp, roots split 

into parched cracks. 
We hide, thirsty, inside this poem,

only words to drink.
Inside this poem all the fear 
in the world. And all that we lose.

Then, the oranges, juice 
dripping, and pomegranates,

wild red seeds staining.
Their tree-roots beseech
the subterranean lake,

so deep, Find me,
sunken under, Water me.

So much I’ve lost under my skin, 
down in the secret parts of me.
Some things, no return.

But to come, the smell
of rain, the rain itself, the tears.

For Jack Ridl

He introduces himself just before the needle,
My name is Rodel, he says, after my dead brother
Rodelio. I offer my arm and the blood slips
into his vials, two needed this time. My brother 
died at three months, he says fifty years ago in 

the Philippines, my only brother. I don’t usually watch
the red liquid from my body course into the tube, today 
I want to see it fill up the ampules that will bear it to the lab.
Is it thick as the blood between these Asian brothers? I ask 
him, is there a reason he told me this today? How he 

couldn’t have known about you, your also-lost brother,
the poem you sent me just an hour before. Your brother dead 
in the womb so many years ago.The brothers neither of you 
would ever have. Both of you, only sons. Rodel, thirty, 
you past seventy. How the two of you became friends 

through my blood. My blood on the way to the lab, coagulated 
into numbers of discovery, useful information, possible 
hope. Your brothers’ hemoglobin in your bodies forever. 
Blood brothers. Stories of possibility lost in the dirt
of death. Sports never played, careers never found,

no teaching how to throw a ball, how to lose
your homework. How you both live on in their shade, 
their voices whispering about what could have been. 
My blood on the way to its future. All blood, 
transfused with the ways of our losses, our passage.