“People just choose to be pink, everyone is born blue.” “People with pink marks are going straight to hell.”

“There are places to go to get your pink mark made blue again, so why not go?” “These millennials with their pink marks.”

“Blue marks are the superior marks.” “Hello.”

Aria pointed at the little flower on her ankle with a short, chubby finger and asked her mother in her unpracticed, fragmented English about what it was. “Pretty,” she said, her ‘r’ little too rounded and her voice broken up by her childish laughter.

I hate diaspora poetry

as much as the next

fed-up immigrant

All that bullshit

about “lives stained

with honey and turmeric”

and “the colonizer

cutting my tongue with

aluminum shears”

is utterly boring

The night before my first day of sixth grade, I studied the piece of fabric laid out on my bed with uncharacteristic placidity. It was no work of art; plain cotton fabric, dyed black, with a single strip of black lace for adornment.