When I was a girl my nipples were hard enough to cut my hands - a point of pride

The women’s choir is not for people like you. We’d heard this before. So we marched, as we have done two times before, out of the church with a mixture of accomplishment and dread.

He will wish away the well-meaning glances that say how far you must have come to get here, how proud your people must be, what an accomplishment it is to be the only one.

The city is supposed to make me want to go out at night but most of the time I just want a lot of money and no plans.

Some days the bees are melancholic. Someone spills soda in the hallway and the bees spend hours with sugar on their feelers, leaving small sticky footprints up the spines of #2 pencils. I’m not convinced they’ll ever handwrite an essay.

He calls us his little birds, his little doves. We do not call him God. He tells us this.