"Lose something every day — drop coins / from the hole in your pocket, go hungry / at school."

"老家 are the characters: old and home. Which is better translated as one’s 'ancestral home.' The 老家 is the place and community where your lineage can be traced."

"These words, herbs, and visions accompanied me through a monthlong spiritual ceremony of separation."

"I have hunted for Mother / Howled at Mother Moon / Pricked my healing with Mother Cactus / Touched my pleasure parts, the Mother Wound"

"to stay together means not to begin living / to begin living is a separation"

"LA was where I came to understand myself, and where I came to learn from decades of organizing and Asian diaspora history in North America."

"unwieldy love ritual of spring- / time pushing golden violet into the sky as / trinket and incense, your voice / in my warm hand. Who are you / in your dreams?

"Our resistance—as dense, multiple, and multiplying as forests and old growth—must outsize these legacies."

"The body is a lush field of shame plants. Touch the body and it folds. Touch the body and it turns its back."

"A story that you cannot leave is a prison."

"The good memories turn. Admit you loved me, the woman mutters over her mother’s grave."

"Novelty is a particularly dense manifestation of relying on the Other to become simultaneously the grounding of and the escape from the Self."

"I commit to never speaking of this Loyalty Oath and its existence to anyone."

If I haven’t been home in three years, does home still exist?

"I was a veritable saint. Not that I was opposed to doing any of those things, I just didn’t happen to do them, I didn’t know how to be more of a sinner."