Excerpted from Vi Khi Nao’s full collection, REVERSE ABYSS, & written in the liminal space between pre-op fear and post-op scars, i am just a water-stained wallflower on your tablecloth stitches together tongues, hearts, lungs—Vietnamese, Vietlish, English, the silent algorithms of mathematics—sewing and forging a queer idiolect where survival and history pulse in the same wound. This elegy in fragments presses scars into ink, distills medical reports into shattered hymns, and twists bilingual longing into new grammars of pain. Each aching "my dear," each aching "em ơi!" is a needle pulling the thread between tenderness and rupture.

Vi Khi Nao is a multidisciplinary writer working across poetry, fiction, theater, film, and collaborative art. She won the 2016 Nightboat Poetry Prize for The Old Philosopher and the 2017 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize for A Brief Alphabet of Torture. Her latest novel, The Italy Letters, was published by Melville House. A former Black Mountain Institute fellow, she was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022.