Bread and Bread

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash My cousin's husband says his family was robbed by undocumented immigrants when he was a kid, only he doesn't say "undocumented." That's what the cops told his family. To me it sounds like something cops would say if they couldn't solve a crime, but I might be wrong.  He baits me: Wait until they come for you. Do YOU want to spend your time with criminals? Share your bed with gang members?  I tell him I have spent a lot of time with gang members, most of them citizens, and it was just fine. I say MS 13 is an American export. We should apologize to El Salvador. I say I didn't know that wanting someone not to be deported and dehumanized meant I had to marry them.  My cousin's husband dares me to share a bathroom with a trans woman, only he doesn't say "trans woman." I do, that very weekend, in a pizza restaurant in a college town. I wash my hands next to her in the trough sink. I think she is kind of cut...

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash I wish I was more connected to my ancestors,  I tell Nicole, after she says she talks to her mom and grandma.  Let's face it: I am a middle-aged white woman. Of course I want this. But I cannot join the folklorico group, and my grandmother has never spoken to me in the form of a luminescent manta ray. I am not Moana.  Nicole and I share cancer-dead mothers, and fear of our own genetic codes. At the coffee shop, a friend of a friend is talking about her engagement. She and her boyfriend went hiking in Santa Cruz. She planned to propose. She designed a pendant for him, a sunflower with an opal at its center and a spiral on the back. For growth and interconnectedness, she says. They were deep in the forest, the dappled sunlight starting to fade. The right moment had not yet  announced itself, and so the young woman seized the one they were in.  Would you— The young man said, Wait!  He put his knee to the forest floor, and pre...