The year we lived in dissonance, wisteria tore open the rust-scabbed pipes. We walked barefoot and cut our hands—dreamt black oil, uranium children, and elephants instead of sheep. One night, the rain came like bombs. Our dogs scattered and ran away. When dawn broke into a wildfire, the walls had fattened into red forests, their leaves unfurling like loosened jaws. I clawed six inches of acid soil in the backyard until I found the bird bones, gleaming up at me like cold, white teeth. I held their honeycomb cavities and reasoned in radioactive decay. This time, I prayed for a song, a shovel—and a sister whose body I could hold.
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Grace Q. Song is a Chinese-American writer from New York. Her poetry and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Gone Lawn, The Shallow Ends, DIALOGIST, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Into the Void, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, Passages North, PANK, and elsewhere. A high school senior, she enjoys listening to ABBA and Yoke Lore.