Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what. They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their hands and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.

It's not the lying itself that makes makes me feel bad but the fact that I'm here lying to my friends. I don't like not playing with them and I don't like lying to them because they are the most important thing to me and when I'm not with them I feel like I'm not even me.

Now when the men talk, their voices burn in the air, making smoke all over the place. We hear about change, about new country, about democracy, about elections and what-what.They talk and talk, the men, lick their lips and look at the dead watches on their wrists and shake their heads and slap each other and laugh like they have swallowed thunder.

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger may be pacified in foreign lands, their tears wiped away in strange lands, the wounds of their despair bandaged in faraway lands, their blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands.

If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn't remember their names.

We're hungry but we're together and we're at home and everything is sweeter than dessert.

He doesn't tell Aunt Fostalina she looks good, like I've heard other people do; he tells her she looks like sunrise.

In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God.