It is no coincidence that this issue, that these stories, were published in mid-June. June for Black folk has a particular indelible significance that is difficult for this poet to pen. June is a month that means freedom.

Most days I find the taste of mango between your legs, but other times it surprises where I least expect it, lingering on your fingertips or behind your knee, on the end of a sun-burnished strand of hair. Some days green and self-protective, plaintive and tart or sharp and haughty, other days almost rudely overripe, tender and gushing over my teeth.

A waygookin was the only witness to the Gongdeok hit and run. That night, Izzy—the foreigner in question—heard the crash before she saw it. On a side street that spidered out somewhere near Gongdeok station, wheels squealed, sounding like something dying.

I lost my mother’s red plastic heart sunglasses when I was seven. She used to wear them with a pair of dark denim pedal-pushers whose seams were stitched with blood-red thread.

She waits for me by the curb outside the public elementary school while other kids gather to walk home together. A lucky few get whisked away, ushered into cars far better than mine.

No one ever thought that I would become friends with the loosest Black girl in town, a girl whose cool confidence belied her tumultuous mind. Her name was Candice, and I met her the summer I turned sixteen, just a week after she turned eighteen.