Essays

I didn’t understand consent, the formal severance of me and my biological father. Like magic, my past dissipated.

I don’t know which herbs, spices, or ice cream flavors you like because 23&Me won’t tell me, and neither will you.

Teeth line the leaves of the agave, protecting fleshy, leathery spined crescents that open like a bowl to the sky. Perhaps I would have a higher tolerance for flowers as vaginal metaphors if their petals had teeth.

Last summer, I tied my hair into braids and glued a mustache to my upper lip, and I wondered if you might recognize your own youth.

Songs of the sea, of the forecastle where the sailors slept at night: Home, Dearie, Home.

Vickie Lynn became a stripper by chance.

Words that do not match their peers or adhere to linguistic rules and expectations are the driving trope for the discordance of the immigrant experience in this novel.

All she knew was that she couldn’t let it happen again. All she knows is that a body is a dangerous place to be.

Maybe it was not such an obstacle after all, if it was going to save our lives one day. This is how my brain came to be rewired.

That Saturday, the day of my belated sleepover, the only full day I had with my dad for the entire week, he scheduled my final lesson.