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The essays in ROOM 10.25 are as raw and urgent as any we have received. Their authors hail from Sudan, Palestine, Israel, Croatia, and the US. They write about what it feels like to be living a split screen. They write about how we split words…
We can’t split something off when we’re surrounded by it. The same forces flattening Gaza are showing up here under different names—economic inequality, xenophobia, the rollback of human rights. I’m trying to bridge the divide between denial and collapse, to…
My first day volunteering at immigration court began with a medical emergency. A man had collapsed in his wheelchair while DHS officers surrounded his terrified family. When I identified myself as a physician, they demanded proof before allowing me to…
My brother, Mamoun, was murdered in Khartoum. I write as a Sudanese psychotherapist, sister, and witness, carrying a grief that lives in my bones. This war has ruptured not only bodies and homes but our sense of self and belonging.…
Joyce Pommer was born in Quincy, MA, and studied at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and the Art Institute of Boston. She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows, as well as at art fairs in…
Every spring, my mother dreamt of Crimea, and that’s how we knew winter was ending. Now, exiled from those shores, I still dream of its herbs, its sea, its air. Eleven years have passed since I last returned. For those…
This is a letter exchange between two mothers — one living in Gaza, one in safety — writing across war and impossible distance. It captures the collapse of the clinical frame, the limits of Western psychology, and the power of…
Natasha Kinsella is an Irish poet and essayist drawn to the places where faith, silence, and inheritance converge. Her work listens to what the body remembers when language falters. It has been highly commended in the 2025 Patrick Kavanagh Award,…
In late October 2023, Eyal and I began a correspondence. We generated two publications and a film about our histories. In the process, something began to cohere between us. Our dialogue revealed a common humanity. He was willing to understand…
In Gaza, we live in a state that feels like waking up after a long night of fragmented, restless sleep. It’s as if you’ve spent the night on the edge of fear—between the hum of drones, the echo of explosions,…
While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings, I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite…
We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to…
The floors are red, not as a metaphor, not as a political statement; they are red. And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red? Are we made of the same substance, the same suffering, the same…
Such desires must be obfuscated. Indeed, in the face of blatant refusal to protect children, which amounts to relentless aggression against them, we find psychoanalytically curious invocations of protection amidst active harm, a phenomenon observable in abusive families and troubled…
Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that ‘works’ for everyone—allowing us to maintain our identities, our professional roles,…
I began having violent fantasies about walking through the halls with a duffel bag full of guns, shooting whomever I saw as well as throwing grenades into classrooms.
The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell…
Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also…
Nan Cohen is the author of two books of poems and the chapbook Thousand-Year-Old Words (2021). She is a past recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and an NEA Fellowship. She teaches high school in…
Cynthia Sparrenberger is an American mixed-media artist based in Indiana. Her art conveys satirical social commentary on the broad-ranging vulnerabilities of the human condition, with its imperfections, alienations, and existential angst. Sparrenberger works in a variety of formats, encompassing sculpture,…
