The night of the second presidential debate, I called my mother. It wasn’t supposed to be a political call;

Omar annoyed me for the normal reasons that students annoy teachers.

Politics is like an awful off-Broadway play that can’t decide whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy.

In the summer of 2015, I was working in Spain for a theater project with a Spaniard friend of mine.

I grew up in a schism. My father came of age in a Jewish family from Massapequa, New York, and my mother a Baptist family from Dalton, Massachusetts.

On a family ranch, you have to earn your belonging.

Floating on the bubbly foam of her extra hot latte is a wilting tulip pattern that looks like the wounded black bird she saw lying dead by the fountain yesterday.

I picked the boy out because his picture looked friendly and his profile said that he only had two weeks left in the States.

During my first semester of college, I played what I thought was a “fun icebreaker” — a game I called Guess My Race!

I remember completing the initial draft of my first play, Nothing But The Truth, during the summer of 2013; I was convinced I’d created a masterpiece.

To fight your family’s genetic tendency to become ghosts, you rub makeup on your face so people can see you.

El Coyote appears before my shack, silhouette illuminated and clear. He removes his fedora and taps it against the wall, dust and sand in my eyes.

Both men made me promises. They said it would be better, that there would be bounty. And space, so much space between homes.

I knew a lot had changed in my part of town since I left because cafes had cropped up all over the place, like small checker pieces from other boards migrating over to ours.

I had finally begun to build a home of my own. Unsettled and confused after college, I moved to Monterey, a coastal town in California, where I was amongst friends and working as a preschool teacher.