My second home in the summer months: the cannery. Here, I stand in the damp cold, spoon in hand, scraping out the spinal bloodlines of salmon until the piles are gone.

The waiting room is a collage of almosts: almost asleep, almost calm, almost able to explain.

You can only suffocate so many embryos with your own blood vessels before you start to believe in your bones that this is what you’re meant to do, what you deserve.

It’s as easy as it sounds in my grandparents’ letters to live a normal life under an authoritarian regime. You love or fall out of love, you go on summer adventures, defend a dissertation. The trains keep running, cows keep giving milk.

Watching Chinese immigrants shouting curt orders to Black workers in their newly learned English was often like observing a failed game of telephone, as the workers’ faces bore quiet offense.

We sent a blast into our social universe asking for the joker to reveal themselves and were met with intrigue but no answers. Superstition says one cannot buy one’s own tarot deck. It must be passed down or bestowed.