Summary
At the beginning of "Not Even," the speaker addresses the reader with a sense of humor. He claims he "used to be a fag" but now is a "checkbox" (Line 2). Several seemingly unrelated descriptions are given: the speaker feels the mark of progress by a pen tip jabbed in his back, he refuses to dance and blast sad songs in a graveyard for nothing, and he insists on his own presence to the reader. Difficult topics enter the poem: the speaker's experience feeling things "that made death so / large it was indistinguishable from air," the destruction the speaker engaged in while inside this feeling, and the death of the rapper Lil Peep (Lines 6-7). Yet the speaker keeps dancing even when a song is over because it frees him.
The speaker continues to use humor as he describes the apologies whispered between himself and his partner when they purposely use their teeth during intercourse. The speaker claims to have thrown himself into gravity and made it work, then says he made it out by the skin of his griefs.
The poem then focuses on a memory of when a woman at a fancy party on a Brooklyn rooftop told the speaker that he is lucky to be gay and to be able to write about war. She complains that she's just white and therefore has nothing. The speaker responds in the poem by saying that "everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold" (Lines 25-26). He compares this to a sorrow that Midas touched, and to "napalm with a rainbow afterglow." The speaker claims that blood, unlike feelings, gets realer when felt and that he is trying to be real, but it costs too much.
The speaker's people had to dance to the music of machine-gun fire and make a rhythm this way. In photographs, the speaker describes his people as being still as corpses. His failure was getting used to looking at photographs of his people this way without thinking, get up.
The speaker asks philosophical questions about life, such as "What if it wasn't the crash that made us, but the debris?" (Line 42). He asks if it was meant to be this way: the mother, the lexicon, the / line of cocaine on the mohawked boy's collarbone in an East / Village sublet in 2007" (Lines 43-45). The speaker's anguish comes through. He asks a figurative doctor what's wrong with him and comments that one needs sorcery to make it out.
The next section of the poem focuses on a memory of an Amtrak ride through Iowa in which the speaker saw a man standing alone in a field. The speaker put his book down and cried. A woman comforted him, telling him there's no shame in breaking open.
Back in the poem's present, the speaker says that his harm is gorgeous because it belongs only to him. He muses on being "a dam for damage" so that his "shittyness will not enter the / world" (Lines 68-69). After interjecting a rhetorical question about whether the reader knows how many hours the speaker has wasted watching straight boys play video games, the line that gives the collection its title appears. "Time is a mother," the poem reads, and "Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center" (Lines 73-74). The speaker points out the similarity between the Vietnamese words for "love" and "weakness."
The speaker imagines whispering to his mother's body to get out from the bag she was zipped in. He then says the phrase in full, Time is a motherfucker, to his mother's gravestones. After calling his body a doorway, he beseeches that it be more than what he'll pass through. Like the man who stood still in the Iowa field, the speaker caves, deciding that his life will be made of joy from now on. The final image of the poem is of the speaker being reborn from his mother, this time feeling enough.
Analysis
Like "Beautiful Short Loser," "Not Even" brings together a variety of themes, images, and linguistic observations in the poem that gives the collection its title. With a conversational and humorous persona, the speaker handles life in all its complexity. The first lines, "Hey. // I used to be a fag now I'm a checkbox" demand attention and point out the ways in which factors of identity have become tokenized (Lines 1-2). The poem returns to this later when the speaker shares a story about a woman telling him he is lucky to be gay and to be able to write about war (Lines 21-24). The "luck" (concerning the war that the speaker's people went through) that the woman envies bears the mark of violence and forced separation. The comment that the speaker is making is that individuals from these "lucky" groups are made to represent the entire group in what is only a symbolic gesture of inclusivity.
Several lines in the poem, starting with the third, connect back to the very first poem in the collection, "The Bull." With a pen tip jabbed in his back, the speaker feels "the mark of progress" (Line 3). This is the bullseye that the epigraph poem describes using the colors of the ocean (hence the poet). The act of writing is the same as the reaching that occurs in "The Bull"; it is a reaching towards the speaker's own depths. The bull itself is an entrance to the speaker's journey of self-actualization. In "Not Even," the speaker addresses his body as a doorway, and asks it to be more than just what he'll pass through (Lines 86-87). Stillness, portrayed as a god in "The Bull," also finds its way into "Not Even." The speaker's people "still" found a rhythm of life in difficult circumstances, and they are portrayed as being "still...as corpses" in photographs (Lines 34-35). The word "still" is used in the poem as both an indicator of motionlessness and as a continuation of the past into the present.
Music and dancing appear alongside destruction in "Not Even." In what at first seem to be random images, the speaker describes dancing alone in a graveyard at midnight while blasting sad songs on his phone and continuing to dance even after the music ends because it frees him (Lines 4-5 and 11-12). But later in the poem, the speaker portrays his people as having made a rhythm by dancing to machine-gun fire (Lines 33-34). This reference to the Vietnam War echoes all the way into the speaker's present even decades later.
The speaker hones in on his own sorrow and the collective sorrows of various groups. Early on in the poem, it reads, "I felt things that made death so / large it was indistinguishable from air—and I went on / destroying inside it like wind in a storm" (Lines 6-8). The issues of mental health and death by drug overdose come up in the line, "The way Lil Peep says I'll be back in the mornin' when you / know how it ends" (Lines 9-10). The trauma from the Vietnam War is also present in the poem. The speaker later jokes about his own sorrow with the line "I made it out by the skin of my griefs" (Line 19). Vuong has spoken about his hesitation to use humor in his previous work, stating that he did not want to invite readers to laugh at the collective pain of a group that they (the readers) weren't part of. However, Vuong felt mature enough as a writer to pull off using humor alongside sorrow in this collection.
Just as the word "still" is imbued with multiple meanings in the poem, other words carry different layers of significance. After asking readers if they know how many hours the speaker has wasted watching straight boys play video games, a single line reads, "Enough" (Line 72). This not only answers the question in a funny way but indicates a change in the poem's direction. The following line gives the collection its title, Time is a Mother. Vuong has spoken about appreciating the holding back that sometimes occurs from the full phrase, "motherfucker." There is an aporia in expressing something by coming right up to it, but not wanting to finish its formation. The description of time as a mother also renders time as something capacious, forgiving, and originating. The final image of the poem shows the speaker being "lifted, wet and bloody, out of [his] mother, into the / world, screaming // and enough" (Lines 96-98). Vuong uses language in this poem and in the entire collection as a malleable and creative technology.
