"Sometimes I feel like an ex-pat in my own nation,/ and an outsider among my own people
until I remember/ Grandpa’s hands teaching me to scour banks for mudbugs/ to be eaten at dinner, like he did as a kid."
"feeling your heart beat through your screaming chants, hearing your sorrow through the reverbing stomps, smelling the fear in your every breath, and touching the hope in your gravelly voice" Poetry.
"When one of your oldest friends texts you, you answer immediately. When that friend texts you a photo of her engagement-ringwearing hand, you drop the phone."
"Daniel arrived outside of the house in a blue button-up and a pair of gray pants that his mother had picked out for him at Brooks Brothers. He knew how this would go." Fiction.
"Pearl Smith did not trust a living soul. 'Living' is an important distinction because her one surviving relative was a wicked, degenerate nephew, while her primary confidant was her late third husband with whom she regularly spoke." A nurse's tales from an emergency room floor.
"The room, which was situated in the bowels of an old Lower East Side tenement building, was hot and smelled like a hundred people’s sweat, even though it was mid-January."
"Beautiful creature of the / stars! Let us tumble and fall / through the green and white foothills / pressing together between / the inky heavens and earth."
"I intentionally dress up to erase the label I owned yesterday. Today, I’m a circus ringmaster; yesterday, a disco girl; the day before, an air-force-pilot-meets-janitor."
"This was before he was my grandfather, before he was Papa. Before his visit to a new country defined his family’s future. Americanness was only a hope."