I. We were alone most afternoons. On one of them, we searched my room for candles. We found one that I liked: white with Colombian coffee beans clustered around the bottom. “Eat it,” I said. “No,” my brother said, furrowing his eyebrows, turning away. “Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it.” I backed him into a corner with the coffee end of the…

The stones come to dance; parachuting up, four black rocks gasp slowly for air like fish in a daze. My feet dart ripples in the water, cool and neat as knives. Wind aching to peel down my pant- ies. It sings my skirt off my skin, ripped in fishbone-two. It wants inside me, the Black Girl Reading by the River. And I may just be the Black Girl…

The work was originally published in MariNaomi's TURNING JAPANESE