From The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness:

I returned to college under a heavy and invisible blanket of illness. I carried my portable IV antibiotics with me in a cooler, and my roommates sat with me in rocking chairs while I shot liquid antibiotics into my arm.

I rolled between classes and bed and back to classes like a wet log, waking with a start to find I had been dead asleep, face first on my desk in a class called The Amazing Brain.

Now my health was a trickster, a shape-shifter, a shroud, a mist.

From Slaves for Peanuts:

The name Kajoor derives from the Wolof word dior, which means soil or, to be precise, sand. Kajoor means people of the sand.

It is an area that never seemed promising to newcomers. The dry season lasts most of the year, which means that winds often comb dried-up creeks and harvested fields, whipping up sand spouts that move across the horizon like bad omens.

From Better to Have Gone:

From Invisible Child:

Dasani is not one for patience. She likes being first – the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to rise each day. It is the stuff of family lore. She was running before she could walk. Even her name speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water came to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before Dasani was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences.

From Everything Below the Waist:

The papaya plant has the enviable ability to grow either “male” flowers or “female” flowers or both, and it may switch sexes entirely during a heat wave, or after the fruit is harvested. Among the sola variety, native to Hawaii, a majority of plants will grow male and female flowers simultaneously, which ensures a crop will bear fruit.

From White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination: