today, the well in my grandmother’s garden is empty.
I empty it.
In Vietnamese, nước means water,
means country.
Nước sông trickles into my grandma’s orchards,
fills the well like a song.
engraved in sống is the word alive.
I wonder if the water I drained today
caressed the skin of the country it drowned,
whether it carried the boats that kept
us
living.
either way, nước sống,
tôi sống.
the ways that the water still keeps me alive.
heathen water,
Holy water,
human water.
That is to say,
my mother never lost her son,
and I touched my brother,
hair, lips, and flesh his wet body
even when I did not know him.
from the muddy nước, a lotus blooms.
under our feet, a gourd made of human skin.
Thanh Nguyen (she/they) is a poet and musician from Atlanta, Georgia currently living in Amman, Jordan. Her writing focuses on colonial displacement, exile, and belonging. Outside of poetry, Thanh also pursues decolonial imaginaries as a project coordinator at a liberation theology center based in Palestine. Their work has been featured in Re:Visions Magazine and Silk Road Review. She can be found on instagram at @ttnpoet.
the Decolonial Passage 