To Huu Nguyen has not lived an easy life. To was born in Hà Nam Ninh, amid revolutionary fervor on January 5th, 1934, in the northern region of what was then French Indochina. The third child in a family of six, he would bury his father before his 12th birthday…

In the bloom of sunshine I lay here dying. Purgatory is real, and it exists within the quiet between every end and each beginning. …

Obituaries were strange things to read. An entire life, condensed into the crawlspace of three paragraphs. How do you choose which parts to include? What is worthy of importance, and why? Which moments get the privilege of being memorialized, which memories get the pleasure of being left to rot? The…

Cigarettes had no effect on him. They tanned his tongue into hide, left his throat cracked and dry like a shriveled salt flat. And yet the telegraph operator kept smoking. It was a remote outpost, some thirty miles from civilization on all sides of him, though a settlement of Catholic…

there is a cycle of violence that goes beyond wars and economic exploitation. there is violence beyond imperialism and misogyny and transphobia and every other word your mother told you to be scared of before you went to university the war followed us home. from pakistan to vietnam to sudan…

you can know the value of something while you have it but its worth is something that can only be understood in hindsight it’s a stupid feeling, isn’t it? cheeks grow flush with a torrent of blood is that embarrassment or shame? what vintage is spilling over this time? you’ve…

And it was then that the panic set in on him, like a pack of wild dogs. It tore great chunks out of his psyche, gnashing reason and reality into piecemeal before swallowing it greedily, in the same way that a soldier drinks water following combat. Jordan felt his heartbeat…

The image a child has of his father is that of brawn. A monument to all that is good and strong in the world, an eternal force that will watch over them and theirs. The image a child has of her mother is that of care. A testament to beauty…

Intellectualizing trauma and the things we do to cope is bad. But so is contextualizing that within a binary framework. There is no room for growth, for imagination, for all the lives we’ve yet to live between the white space of letters. Things simply are or they are not. It’s…