I have grown out of the sock drawer. a vagrant unfit holed structure that still somehow keeps you warm.

I read things and they float away. I would rather stare at my own breasts. “Mind like a steel sieve,” my father would say.

“I understood that a crying man was not a gay man, and Stainless and I were not friends.”

“I don’t know what the break-in meant to me at the time, but it was like a stray thread, a thread that, once I tugged upon it, unspooled my entire world and snagged open a portal through which I could escape.”

Bonnie Chau reflects on being Asian-American, the ideas and motivations of representation and visibility, the Amanda Gorman translation debate, and translating out of whiteness.

“What he didn’t understand was that the more heavenly our experience, the starker its contrast with my mind’s occupations, the wider the chasm would yawn between us, the more alienated I’d be. It was like the story of Moses, in which the water of the Egyptians was turned into blood. A curse had crippled me. Shown blue ocean, I saw crimson gore.”

“It’s in making note of the variety of seemingly timeless strategies used by rising authoritarian regimes to create fissures in the foundations of democratic governments that cause them eventually to crumble.”

“The beach was empty, the water calm, but on a pole a few meters from shore a red flag was waving.”