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.

I was looking for Samuel Bernstein’s novel, Lulu, at The Strand, a giant stack of books teetering in the crook of my right arm.

My interdisciplinary art practice evolved from drawings I made while sharing open and public spaces with others.

My parents gave up a comfortable life in China so that their children could have better opportunities.

We found our home driving through the neighborhood adjacent to where I used to live when I was single.

I have spent the last couple of weeks surveying online discussion forums populated by self-identified “incels,” a community of categorically straight men who claim their “involuntary celibacy” as a condition of oppression.

I was ten years old. We were against the wall, all twelve of us, like a criminal lineup outside the girls’ locker room.

It tasted lemony, a smudge of sweet acid on the tip of her tongue, hot from the sun where it had been growing until the moment she plucked it.

“You have such a beautiful voice,” the director said guardedly.

When they come to see the stove, they inhale a simultaneous woosh, the kind of sound that only comes from air moving into the lungs through a constricted trachea, just a hint of a vibration in the back of the throat.

One Friday each fall, Missionary Baptist girls from all over the state of Mississippi were excused from school to journey in their church vans to the cabins of Camp Garaywa for the annual Girls Missionary Auxiliary overnight retreat

My sense of what it means to be an American woman, a queer Aries snowflake, shifts every time I leave and return to my own country.