Editor's Note: This is a content warning for those sensitive to certain topics; self-harm, child loss, graphic descriptions of violence.            Sylvia bent over the lifeless bodies of the newborn infants she had just spent six hellish hours delivering. Screams of anguish poured from her diaphragm, blood soaked her nightgown from the waist down. Her husband William knelt beside her, stroking her shoulder in a futile attempt at comfort. The midwife, an elderly Inuit woman, knelt on her otherside. “Please miss,  you must lay down. Your body has suffered incredible stress, the birth was not a good one.” “My babies, my babies, this can’t be!” Sylvia shrieked, deaf to the woman’s words. “Shh, shh,” William was muttering as he rubbed her shoulders. “Maybe it won’t be, I have already sent for the spirit leader of my tribe. He should arrive any moment.” “Don’t be a fool! How dare you give my wife this false hope! You can clearly see the babies are dead, and besides, no one cou

  Uncle, it is happening again. The rain has come. I have spent thousands of nights praying that the world would realize something when they pulled your small body from the river. How delicate life is. How precious. How it floats and swells and then vanishes in even the gentlest currents. I prayed you would be more than a forgotten proverb. In a story about big men in faraway places. Their empty fists and uncalloused fingertips meeting tabletops unscathed. And the rain falling faithfully in turn. They say they are here to protect us. That we are safe behind a blinding cloud of rubble and the dust of month-old bones. But I always wonder why they did not protect you; my most precious kin. I wonder what it is that must be offered to deserve their protection. Because your fluttering pulse and brand new eyes for an old and broken world were not enough. A child’s body and a child’s heart is not enough. They didn’t protect you when the squall of fire and metal touched down on the land tha

It’s the sense of being an outsider, I think. An odd, directionless haunting that tells me I do not belong. There’s a new awareness of intersectionality in my life lately, with more than too many big, complicated feelings trailing off of it. The friction on the seam where two facets of identity knit together. And in that awareness I’ve grown to understand the vague, faceless sense that has followed me through life: That I am an interloper. Spending time in male spaces I’ve always felt vaguely repulsed: the machismo: the casual objectification of women: boasting about and embracing their emotional trauma — hiding in habits and socialization that I fought for years to unlearn and outgrow. “My parents beat me and I turned out fine.” Men talk about work. Men talk about hobbies and productivity and video games and sports and drinking and women and casual violence and anything to distract from the black, sucking emptiness where their capacity to feel was ripped out of them when they were boy