Nina St. Pierre

In the introduction to French pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s whimsical classic The Little Prince, a Turkish astronomer discovers a new planet, but the scientific community doesn’t believe him because he’s dressed poorly.

"The here and now is a prison house," wrote the late scholar and theorist José Muñoz. “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potential.”

On the hottest Saturday in July, I stood on a chair in a sweaty ballroom at Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel next to a row of giddy dance moms filming their children.

As a flat-chested '90s tween, I spent most of my time in a one-piece. On weekends, I rocked trendy snap-crotch bodysuits while running my neighborhood dance troupe's rehearsal to "Baby Got Back."

This spring, on the eve of the equinox at a loft party in Brooklyn, I hinted to a woman I'd been crushing on that we might have a vibe.

Janet Echelman's elaborate aerial net sculptures fuse ancient craft with modern technology to create massive works that are strong enough to withstand a hurricane.

My first language was one of transcendence. I was raised by a single, nomadic mother on a relentless spiritual journey, and my childhood was laced with chatter of ascended masters and astral traveling.

"Go all the way down this road,” the driver said as he pulled my giant backpack from the combi, a hybrid van-taxi, before chugging off and leaving me at the gated entrance to Vilcabamba, Ecuador’s southernmost village.

I waited in line for an hour to see his heart, eating sausage in a semolina bun with roasted hot and sweet peppers, watching children chase each other around headstones in the church graveyard as live Polka music blared.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet and workshop facilitator. The recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers For Writers Award, she is the founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series.

In Mosaic, HBO’S six episode television series directed by Steven Soderbergh, Jennifer Ferrin plays Petra Neill.