I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.

The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.