Catalina

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

but I felt in my heart that people who were politically neutral were cowards.

I’d stopped believing so, so long ago, it didn’t even make me feel moody and contrarian. It just was what it was.

we were migrants, we were exiles, we were anointed, we were people protected by God, and people like Nathaniel and his friends were tourists.

What Goldman Sachs was to Harvard seniors is what the U.S. Army was to me and my high school classmates.

You can afford a calling card but, try as you might to influence the funeral arrangements, you’re not there. You’re in one of those nightmares where you scream and scream and nobody can hear you. It was our turn now.

Emasculation at the hands of the state is a very cunning thing for the state to do because men will never see it coming from the state.

For years he had made me translate for him at the doctor, the bank, the DMV, and it turns out he could speak English this whole time? The fishmonger

The rest of the world is plundered and bombed so rich white people can eat Caesar salad with each other and be inane.

Out of all the abandoned girls in the world, I could be their valedictorian.