The way restaurants work has never been fair — yet everyone just seems to accept it.

The first time I watched you kill a fish, you were methodical and emotionless, striking it in one blow.

I want to talk to you about awe / what it means to turn / yourself over

What makes a country great? Surely the answer doesn’t lie in vast tracts of forest land that have been converted into concrete megastructures

Four weeks. Four weeks and still the virus. Things that were once normal now seem absurd.

“I need you to do something for me,” you said as you sat across from me in the locker room.

I have wasted these curses on minor disappointments.

The true cost of dying lies beyond the sick. It buries itself in the people who try to love the sick.

retracing frowns is how we forego boundaries, to chase greener passports.

When we raise our hands now, the air is flush / with vacancies.

in the epoch of biodiversity dwindle is a vestigial ritual.

I detected — above the waft of Auntie Anne’s pretzels and the affront of vanilla and eucalyptus from Bath and Body Works — the warm, musky scent of oud.

We live where the fog used to gather every morning, curtaining the streets and freeways in a misty haze.

When the Ferguson shooting and protests erupt in 2014, I am stuck in my own cocoon, mourning recent betrayals in my marriage.

Before my jaw surgery, I got used to doctors holding my face in their hands.