“I can’t separate my experience of being raised by gay people from my experience of being raised by people who watched a lot of their friends die young.”

“to our descendants, this relic is for you too. to our qt ancestors, thank you for seeding me in these fertile ruins.”

On October 10th, 2023, I rediscover a keffiyeh — a traditional Palestinian scarf — while unpacking boxes in my new apartment in Seattle.

It’s Monday morning, April 2020, and I am trying to see if my dad has had a stroke from 800 miles away.

In the photos taken before I wore it, the gown hangs from a grape arbor.

The American dentist who shot Cecil the Lion once said, If I had known this animal had a name … I obviously wouldn’t have killed it.

“It’s the year of getting better,” her mother said as she walked into the room. It was Thora’s second hospital stay of the year.

My mother and grandmother were born in ‘the land of the lake,’ or La Comarca de la Laguna, a cradle of fertile land between the Sierra Madre mountain ranges in the northern Mexican desert

I started asking rivers to feed me as a child—literally, with flesh from fish, then figuratively, with flashes of comfort.

There is a river, lost or hidden, that is impossible to pass six days each week.

“Why is it that the more transsexual I get, the more employable I feel?”

Erin Langner is well into adulthood when she is suddenly overcome with nostalgia—and guilt—about her long-since-over childhood obsession with the late R&B icon Aaliyah. In her essay, “The Sound of Absence,” Langner is a reporter and poet both, investigating the psychological phenomena of cultural erasure while also penning a heart-achingly tender ode to the things we love and lose, and the things time begs us to leave behind.

The summer before I published my first — and so far, only — book, my husband Alonso and I finally saved enough money and time to spend a week in Paris.

We sit across from each other to play the game Othello.

I said goodbye to my father for the first and last time, after his death, in the quietest place in the United States.