Book//mark – Fish in Exile | Vi Khi Nao, 2016
“Snow was predicted, but rain comes heavily in sheets.”
“And soon, like a child that blooms into a hand, I fall asleep.”
“I don’t understand women or cameras. My thoughts are outnumbered by white diminutive dots.”
“Light shifts, lifting the four corners of the room into an origami box”
“Is it better to be at home in exile or in exile at home?”
“I imagine moving through the sea of winter with a boat, a pair of oars, and light”
“My wife lies like a wound. The breeze lifts the curtain so it appears pregnant with air.”
“The clouds take turns combing each other’s manes”
“Our grief is an exiled body.”
“It’s like a festival down there. Banquets and film screenings left and right. Of course,
the only film we watch in the underworld is Satantango”
“When I could fumble through her body in search of lost keys, love seemed real.
There is nothing here anymore. I am giving my wife time to process bliss.”
“I watched the pluvial curtain let down her translucent laces.”
“Two naked infants face each other like gladiators.”
“I stand there like a front burner gazing at the stars and the dismal, faraway sea”
“Sometimes when I chew as slowly as I chew, I can tell if the salt is tears or anchovy paste.”
“Can freedom exist for a fish? Was freedom incarcerated before she met Catholic
and me because she had the entire sea to roam then?”
“When my eyes flutter open, my wife is still sedated in her formless monologue of a dream.”
“I shovel light urgently into my mouth.”
”In one quick and mechanical motion, I exit the diagram of her body. The diagram of the
living room. With all their narratives and the empty lines and shadows and incomplete
voices. I don’t know if I can bend for them anymore.”
“And homicide couldn’t possibly exist if criminals did laundry by hand.”
“What is a lie but a procrastination of truth?”
“My children are pushing me out of their conjoined womb and their infantile fatherland,
pushing me to the edges of their cervices. My children are giving birth to me, legs spread.
And they cry. They cry fiercely.”
Vi Khi Nao, Fish in Exile, 2016
