Tell me how do you sleep? How does one sleep through the screaming of their brothers? How do police sleep on their beds Warmed by the breath of their living spouse, Lulled by the calm of their quiet house? How do they sleep? Unconcerned by the lives they stole Unbothered by their brothers The others We, the others with your scorn sticked on the skin Do you know how we sleep? In the deafening silence of absence The sawing pain of raw injustice Your violence Our bodies Our fles

Dear Travelers, I traveled to Le Chateau de Versailles recently and felt relatively unimpressed, disappointed, bored, and sort of sad. How could one ever be unimpressed with such majesty, such royalty—the epitome of grace and bourgeois? Easy. It’s not real. Fake marble, fake gold, fantasy fantasy fantasy. A reigning symbol of self-indulgence and debauchery that still wields power over two centuries later, and part of it is because we keep deciding to go there. Now, let’s

Dear Old Friends, I’m addressing you today to clarify a few misconceptions you all may have as to why I am no longer present. Let me start by saying that majority of our friendships were built on a foundation of similar tastes in food and proximity. We may have gone to high school together, gone out for drinks, dated, smoked a couple of times, or shared test answers. While each of these interactions have impacted me in more ways than one, one interaction in particular that

Dear father that I never had, Though I always wanted you, I (grew up) without you. Most times I struggled with it, other times I tried not to think about it, but the sense of emptiness was always there and always affected me. I allowed your absence to function as a catalyst for my failure. I used it as a tool to tell my story—a story of coming of age in the economically depressed and crime riddled city of San Bernardino, California. Although, initially, I considered my change