Leftover liquids and the moisture of mourning: the oozes of Ocean Vuong's oeuvre.

This article examines the role of moisture as a metaphor and material in Ocean Vuong’s poetry and prose to explore queer, minor modes of Vietnamese refugee mourning and melancholia in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It argues that leftover bodily and environmental liquids—such as sweat, blood, and rain—function as ambient, mutable substances that disrupt conventional narratives of war as discrete historical events, instead framing militarism as an ongoing, pervasive condition. Through close readings of Vuong’s works, including the poem "Kissing in Vietnamese" and the novel *On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous*, the study highlights how moisture reconfigures the surfaces—of skin, sea, and scholarship—across which racialized refugee subjects emerge, submerge, or transform, challenging dominant psychoanalytic and imperial frameworks. The article situates this analysis within Critical Refuge(e) Studies and related cultural critiques, proposing moisture as a heuristic to understand refugee subjectivities beyond fixed categories of trauma, identity, and political representation.