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 roll our bodies down the hillside
everything feels so green

“With O.J. there was an abyss of recklessness I was willing to dive into, a waxing appetite for danger I was unsure I could swallow.”

"Pearl had grown up knowing and not knowing her mother. It happened sometimes: a child raised by an aunt, by grandparents. The mother hovering at the borders of their lives."

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

“In hindsight, I see the event as strange, a random act of violence from which no lesson can be drawn.”