Essays
Entropy Magazine (January 2019)
Growing up, I remember very little embarrassment surrounding the body. For instance, my abuela never shut the bathroom door. She simply didn’t care who saw what. Whenever my mother chided her about it, she would simply reply, So what? Your body is my body…
Yemassee (Fall 2018)
Every so often my mother declares that we are just like those Gilmore girls. But she says it in her broken English with her thick accent so that it comes out more like mija, you see how we’re las Gilmores?
“Las Gilmore Girls”
Hobart (December 2017)
That winter my mother takes me to her country, a little place on the equator I had not yet seen. That winter I trail on her heels as we amble around the old neighborhood where gasoline meets salt air…
The Offing (August 2016)
When my father writes to me he says, I know this must be awkward for you. I think of things that have been awkward for me: Like the way a tongue first crosses into your mouth. Or when you say I love you, and the response is not “Ditto.”
Bodega Magazine (Issue 45, May 2016)
People tell me I love television like we’re in some kind of relationship, but my abuela, who was never more than a housewife and glorified babysitter—she was the O.G. TV-watcher. The woman could not figure out how to talk into a cell phone, but she kept a military-grade mental schedule of her telenovelas…
Re-printed in Tube Talk: Big Ideas in Television (November 2017, Great Books Foundation)
The Toast (April 2016)
If something inexplicable happens to us, we struggle to put it in terms of some kind of causal relationship—x-thing happened, so y-thing was the result. Some days, we might boil down the whole of human experience to this two-sided equation…
Re-printed in ELLE Magazine (April 2016)
The Los Angeles Review (Volume 17, Spring 2015)
My mother says I should think with my brain and not my heart when it comes to men. I don’t know how to tell her I’m not sure I’ve been thinking with either. I think maybe my liver has had some say. I think maybe my lungs may dictate me. Or maybe my appendix. But not my brain or my heart…
“Between Us”
Palaver (Spring 2015)
I sometimes feel as if writing is a way of speaking aloud the worst things and making them better. Or, sometimes, that it is its inverse—that in speaking aloud a good thing, it will concretize its truth. And so I write…
Brevity (Issue 42, March 2013)
I am still learning my body. I am still learning how it resists me. It would be nice to have two bodies. The one you’re given; the one you pick…