Confession: I don’t know my ancestors’ names. Also: my Mandarin is lousy. I have never been to our ancestral village.

The first thing you need to know about Hot Spring Leisure City is that there are no hot springs.

what would queer visions of the family network look like?

"taken-Black" …girl, too umber for proper / amber alert. Black / girl, skipped right past “missing” into / “Lost: B L A C K girl”. nobody / even noticed

You are younger than her labor for [redacted aircraft manufacturing company].

Humza went to school with me in Kohat. We were always competing with each other for the first position in class.

Do you have an elderly parent who has fallen victim to internet conspiracy theories?

I was being led by something. So tender and raw inside of my body that I can’t point to a specific place — there was me before I had ever seen a dam.

The week the pandemic hits, I break my lease in Little Haiti and drive fifteen hours up the I-95 to be with my parents.

I am not. Two weeks or more since a call. To be in America, / You must see American, close your eyes and dream American

Every morning the sparrows sing / Every day there is another funeral

so let's talk then about unruliness / how it defies the joys of order & everything / that's missed.

Quail rise in ruffles from the sage. / Pebbles I scraped into my knee look / like they belong there.

Elsewhere a bell rings /medieval in its calling and here / I fumble for a reliquary