Queenie

specked with shards of gold.

ran a hand through her hair

felt my throat tighten.

fleet of Nigerian men

swerved the question.

“Oh, hold on, you’ve got the Q mug.” I reached out for it.

“This one’s going to be mine.” He lifted it out of my reach. “Like you’re mine,”

Gemini men, they are takers. They will take every single thing from you, and they will drain you. They will never give to you, ever, because it’s not about you, it’s always about them. And they will leave you broken, in a heap on the floor.

I wasn’t going to have a baby. Obviously. But it would have been nice to have the choice.

“Maybe if all ah we had learned to talk about our troubles, we wouldn’t carry so much on our shoulders all the way to the grave.”

“It’s not putting black lives on a pedestal, I don’t even know what that means,” I said, my heart beating fast. “It’s saying that black lives, at this point, and historically, do not, and have not mattered, and that they should!” I looked first at Gina, then around the room to see if anyone was going to back me up. Instead, I was met with what I’d been trying to pretend hadn’t always been a room full of white not-quite-liberals whose opinions, like their money, had been inherited.