Their shells pricked my fingers, the spikes digging tauntingly into my skin. 

My best friend and I always talk about how we're going to change the world. 

The embassy called and approved our request to leave the country. So we packed our clothes and a couple of other essentials, leaving the rest behind.

When my mother and father had left for the west, they brought few things with them. 

In the jungles of Aklan stands a statue of a man I've never met.

Stands a monument to a face I've never seen.

My words can be a sense of comfort, a feeling of being understood, a thought, an awakening. 

Throughout my many travels, to all sorts of exotic lands, never before have I seen a diet so extraordinary as that of the snamuh.

They say 7 billion people stayed home today

2.2 billion children stayed out of school

Change is unexpected. 

Like the day I was told we were moving to America. 

My mother came into the kitchen with a blank face. "We're leaving," she said. "We're going to move in with Ahmad in New York." 

Thirty-two nights without seeing a start

Bright, shining, good luck, good luck for me.

I am an American boy

with a Mexican twin. 

These are the scents I will take with me when I leave this house.

My teacher, Ms. Waterson, wore glasses, and I kept an earnest gaze on them as I spoke . . .

the first missile tears through the skin;

skinning the embers of a quenched country

When Uchechi’s voice crackles with laughter and her almond brown eyes crease . . .

There's a sort of spell that falls over the dinner table as we wait for the athan to sound.

“Black people don’t eat sushi.” He said it while I was in the middle of filling a bowl with grits . .

I grew up eating an excessive amount of eggs. Actually, that’s a little misleading.

In November 2018, the horrific picture of a migrant mother and her daughters fleeing . . .

Perpetually sitting in a corner of my room is a large carrier bag filled with cast-off clothes.

Sweet Erin you lay far from me, 

In soils toiled by blight and blood.

I believe in

People Places,

A Place for every Person to

I found love in the plastic heart of a run-down souvenir shop. Sweat had dried in a sticky landscape across my back, and I was out of breath from the sheer force of the midday sun, and I was standing in between . . .