binh do

i wrote and submitted this in the bathroom of a party. 2025, what a year: moving out, playing tennis for the first time in years, witnessing djokovic still play legendary tennis, watching my parents separate, seeing a viet kid named learner tien winning left and right ... phew

for @havehashad.com

A group of blue-green dots on a dark blue background with lines between them to denote the shape of a "constellation" of Clepsydra

Astrolabe Winter 2025 -- Nnadi Samuel - "Honeysuckle; From Lugard's white, scented Hands" & "The Field of my Person, A Thing to be Conquered" Vikki C. - "Elegy for a Grown World" Susan L. Lin - "She Had Her Head in the Attic" Lisa Dailey - "Under the Sea" Binh Do - "The Angel of History" Didem Arslanoglu - "Nine"

The Clepsydra is live! As the year runs out, we hope you'll thieve away some time to spend with this wonderful group of prose, poetry, and artwork.

astrolabe.ooo

featuring...
@vikkicwrites.bsky.social
@binhdaur.bsky.social
@susanllin.bsky.social
Nnadi Samuel
Lisa Dailey
Didem Arslanoglu

The Angel of History • non-fiction from Binh Do This time, we have lunch in Menlo Park, we chase after the morning Caltrain and make it by the last second, and we end up all the way in San Francisco where the sunshine’s the same but the wind feels ...

a piece i wrote this summer. a final act of forgiveness. one step in a lifetime journey of healing.

for @astrolabe.ooo

One Story — Community Mausoleum My lover thus worked on his translation in our mother tongue slowly, but surely, while I went to the Workshop every week to turn in chapters which no one liked, short stories which would end up having...

new piece about falling in love to roberto bolaño.

for coma

thank you so much!

so delighted to have my first skull for something which my friends still make fun of me for so many years later: being convinced to write haruki murakami fan fiction about you and your situationship. love is strange, makes you do things.

for @havehashad.com

congratulations, mizuki!

thank you! looking forward to seeing your debut.

thank you, mizuki!

went to las vegas for the first time a few months ago and felt both deeply awestruck but also lonely from the whole experience on the strip, on fremont street. love, love, love the writer's block and the arts district.

for @maudlinhouse.bsky.social

Between Chamisa and Rengyō - SmokeLong Quarterly I. The rain doesn’t smell the same here, and neither do I. Warm, resinous, alive: piñons and junipers, greasewood and ponderosa, the ghost bloom of Apache plume snagged on old barbed wire, claret cup ...

My story "Between Chamisa and Rengyō" is out!

Thank you to the @smokelong.bsky.social judges for selecting it as the winner of The Smokey award. I am so moved by the recognition 🙏🏻

I hope you enjoy this story:
www.smokelong.com/stories/betw...

thank you so much, mizuki! honored to be in the same issue with such amazing writers like you.

(They Long to Be) Close to You - SmokeLong Quarterly I was awoken by a bad rendition of this very Carpenters song. It had been playing on the intercom of the airplane while I was trying to sleep through the redeye, L.A.X. to LaGuardia, which I had been ...

i have no idea how such a strange story could have ever come about other than that, at the time, i was living such a strange life, one that i needed to write about somehow, in some way. this was the way. thank you so much to the judges of the smokey for giving it a home.

for @smokelong.bsky.social

such a beautiful story, down to every line. おめでとう！

the first thing—even if a small, and brief one, at that—that i wrote, and felt good about, in a very long time, even if it did, in fact, plunge me into equal parts existential crisis and heartbreak, at midnight, while listening to mitski

for @natflashfictionday.bsky.social