Grandma is usually quiet. She forgets names, dates, places, but she has moments of lucidity. She says she’s become a bird.
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i am not always small, somebody’s little sister, somebody’s baby girl born with pneumonia. i guess that makes me a miracle & on god’s green earth how can any miracle be small?
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They give Darrell Grayson the option of Yellow Mama or lethal injection. There is no real fairness in this decision. In not being strung up in a Michael Donald sort of manner.
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I was afraid of cockroaches until I looked at one underneath my microscope. Dialing the lens, my sight spun in and out of focus over a rough, brown landscape.
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Gloria Gao was the first girl I ever hurt. I punched her in the face for calling my family a bunch of dirty mainlanders. I was Taiwanese like her too, but just half, on my mother’s side, which meant the other half of my family must be made up of organ sellers, gutter spitters, and
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The mama mammoth is always there, knee-deep in tar, sinking. Her partner and child wait on the shore. They’re still waiting.
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My colleague and I are drinking beer in a strange town, which confuses him. There are too many consonants, and the gargoyles look odd. The conference we’re attending is inter-disciplinary, and this sets him on edge.
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My grandmother moves mannequins out of the way to get to the refrigerator. It’s a small fridge meant to store kimchi, hidden from customers’ eyes because she covers it with a plaid shawl.
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Michael’s dad died, so we went off to smoke by the BART tracks. Everything meant more when we were stoned, every leaf, every rock, every half-assed piece of graffiti work.
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He found sex disgusting, and I found sex terrifying, and in that way we reached an understanding.
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March 27th , 1981
I twist the curly wire connecting the rotary phone’s receiver to base. My first call to India from nine
thousand miles away.
The first time a guy said I look like a man was at the Jamba Juice stand in the mall. He was still a boy, probably my age and sticky from adolescence. You look like a man. He said it as if he had the right to say anything to me.
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