In the stories, my prayer is the lost darkness of language. In the darkness, the moon carries her heavy belly across the sky before settling back in the home we share. In our home we are always found wanting. Wanting, we sing the songs our mothers taught us to remember we have no mothers. No woman wants to be made an island, the miles of endless shore that holds itself against the break. When we live in the break the world is nothing more than skin, the green-blue shimmer of our scales in the flood of our beauty. At the shores the women light their fires singing the ocean refuses no river, and at the end they return to their small houses to light the fires. In the darkness the moon leaves me, floods herself back in to the sky.