The topic of “real” American identity and assimilation has never been so simultaneously divisive and uniting.

Beyond dead. Torsos glazed with epoxy, exuding an icy sheen. A spinal column exposed, its flimsy cord dangling from a robust sacrum.

Mama was born in the year of the Dog. In the Chinese Zodiac, dogs are known to be loyal and stubborn, of which she was both, but mostly I thought of her as brave.

When a group of Alaskan women flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with Senator Lisa Murkowski during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, I wanted to be on the plane with them.

When we were girls, we weren’t supposed to look adults in the eyes, and when we did, we could barely stand the intensity, felt like we were too close to a human kind of flame.

I got my period two days ago but tell him I’m pregnant anyway.

The heavy door slammed like the hatch of a submarine before descending under water.

Tokador. When I say the word, there’s hesitation in my voice that I can’t help as soon as the first consonant leaves my tongue.

Jenny’s first change, like everybody else’s, was expected.

When I got the phone call the third time Daveonte was shot, I knew it was the last. Still, I held my breath.

Busted furniture. Building materials. Car guts. Then a few feet away, loads more: old clothing, broken toys, soiled diapers.

He’s figured it out. The only way out is to swim, to break water, to surface. It is a long way up, that is how far we have drowned.

Hers is a country of dead people. All those graves scattered over the hill, the white crosses, the angels with their hands on their chests, the pinwheels that spin over children’s graves.

On the phone, you tell me you were frozen, then brought back to life. The freezing shrunk you and stretched you, and you became ugly.

You will be twenty or twenty-one or twenty-two, no younger than nineteen, no older than twenty-four.