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

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

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.

I am gripping my chest as my colleague attempts to reassure me. “The paramedics will be here soon,” she says.

I remember a time when all I wanted to be was Trash.

I drove with no GPS. After what happened, getting lost seemed like a good idea.

In the Soviet Russia of the 1980s, my mom chose not to tell me we were Jewish.

People who claim spaces as sacred are usually referring to mountains covered in snow-dusted firs or ocean waters that received them in their brokenness and led them back to their unshattered selves.

Most of the time I can avoid looking at my left breast — or whatever it’s called now — but when I do, I see the little red capillaries above and below the seven-inch scar snaking from my sternum up into my armpit.