An Atheist Nation
I see Jesus watching people sell grilled chicken and nutritional porridge.
I see Jesus watching people trade real estate.
The Catholic parish lies next to the Buddhist ward,
Inside the market is the Caodaist Divine Eye.
I memorized six family death anniversaries.
I go to the parish to view the nativity grottoes,
I stop by the flower market and go to the pagoda to pick buds;
The Cholon Mosque looks at the Christmas decor counters.
That year grandpa was lost the house waited for the monk,
The day I paid respects to a friend I saw the shaman,
Coming home I passed a blood puddle and three incense sticks before a container truck;
I buried the dog’s corpse with the burst tumor under the bridge.
✶✶✶✶
Thuận Ân is a software quality control engineer based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His work explores internal landscapes and psychological shifts at the borders of reality. His debut English-language fiction appears in Bluestem Magazine and is forthcoming in Cream City Review. His poetry is forthcoming in Burial Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @thuanan_writer.
✶
Jennifer Kircher Herman is a writer and photographer. In her photography, she is drawn to statues, as they capture in stone the emotions of the human hands that carved them. She is widely published in literary journals, including North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Alaska Quarterly, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Rumpus, American Literary Review, and The Nebraska Review, where her work also won the Fiction Prize. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and has been selected to participate in numerous writing workshops including Bread Loaf, One Story, and Kasteel Well, where she won the fiction fellowship. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays on yearning, art, and the human condition.
Another Chicago Magazine 