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They need to be named, loved, then unnamed to be seen once more.

What better place to write the great American novel than North Africa?

It was good they were Africans, she thought. It meant less danger.

This poem weaves human and earthly hurt together in just a few short lines.

“I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room.”

Struggling to find my budget hotel, my stress rose as the sun faded.

“Look down,” I said, comb in hand. “Let me check behind your ears.”

They tried to kill us, my sisters, mother, and me; I still have the scars.

Stopping it, Cye knows, is like stopping a tsunami with a tennis racket.

“Ki-Tae the famous pastor,” Jae says to her. “Can you believe life.”

I felt that this maternal oblivion could be the rest of my life.

The King’s affair was supposed to be a secret. But you know how it is.

The underworld reached out for your hand and found payment.

He’s clear about his wishes: to die in this house, in his own bed.

You and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.

You don’t feel anything when they cut you, not at first, just the blood.

“I can’t hold it any longer. I have to pee,” I finally confessed to Viola.

However hard I trudge and search I cannot find the hills I have climbed.

They caught those few of us left unclaimed by the one emotion, or the other.

In exchange for our labor, we would each be given a new set of clothes.

I don’t think I was very frightened. I was simply hungry for home.

Here’s the part where you pledge devotion until death, I told myself.

He thinks with joy and conviction that the Japanese are his enemy.

In search of the life we all agree is so desirable—art, romance, freedom!

He tossed her over his head like a ballerina, one rough hand on each hip.

My country neither interested me nor inspired any sense of fealty.

A body must learn again how to accept the proprietorial hands of a lover.

No-Horse sucked his lips, imagined the taste of the white girls’ hips.

I could become something new. Improved. Like detergent.

He probably should have arrested or at least reported me to someone.