Mercy there are two lives in which i kill you: hold your body close to mine, kiss your frostbitten nose and sing until you stop crying, sing until i am hoarse and my broken voice sounds like mother's, the warmth of your shallow breaths against my neck. i hold you close and muffle your coughs, wonder how mercy could feel so cold. our sister is six, our brother eight, but starving in an alleyway we are all the same: sickness doesn’t know age. we grow weaker, your coughing louder and louder until your little mouth becomes a klaxon screaming death but i will not let go-- your weight in my arms is my anchor. four little birds covered in snow, i hold you close and kiss your brow, our breath mingling in frosted air, palm against palm against palm, our heartbeats slowing to a crippled infant’s crawl as the seconds slip from our mouths. there are two lives in which i kill you: your little feet kicking as i hold you down our only blanket over your face, over your big black eyes, i steal your breath and promise it is mercy until the feeble death rattle of soft bones against my chest subsides. our sister is six, and our brother eight, but on their knees shovelling dirt with a jagged can lid, they are not gravediggers, but farmers. i lay your twisted body down in its shallow grave-- we are farmers, like our parents were, sowing #life from cursed earth, plucking seconds and minutes and hours from a tree that bursts through the snow where you lay. it looks like you; all stunted and small, its branches bent and bruised with the gnarled horror of your wretched body, each swollen knot in the wood a tiny clenched fist battering against god. but we take its fruit all the same, with three mouths to feed instead of four we have a chance. we turn those seconds into hours, into days, into months: every heartbeat a reminder of the way you fought.

Andromeda when you were just a girl i marched you through the stars and in so doing, sealed your fate between them, two inches of glass between you and oblivion. as you grew your back straightened, shoulders squared, your eyes hardened to gunmetal and my princess became a dreadnought. i carved that smile into your face, so terrible and beautiful to make men tremble and my genetics turned your bones to stone. when you were barely a woman i pushed you into the stars where you died your first death admist corpses who had given up before you. you came back from the fire a monument to sacrifice, made of molten bones, bent but unbroken. i was there in every pair of hands that pinned those honours to your skeleton i was there, my hope, my pride, in every tremor through phantom fingertips that welded metal stars to your bullet scars. my girl the warship, i thought, my girl the un-sunken. when i was an old woman i lost you to the stars. you breathed in oblivion and smiled that wretched smile, knife-carved and cracking, left me the proud mother of a collapsing sun reaching through the glass for a hand you never asked me to take and grasping nothing but stardust.

Goodbye. "A fierce embrace, a word of thanks, a cheerful whistle, and hours in a van. Somehow these pieces must bring back the man you were, but the ocean claims your ashes on the sand." - Vienna Teng

Chinese New Year Mediocre food, awful awful CCTV New Years Gala show and my grandma having the loudest phone conversation in recorded and unrecorded history.

Will Trade Family For Puppy I already know that the fact that I'm convinced I am a waste of air is irrational. I know my melodrama is silly. I don't need to be told. I am perfectly capable of invalidating my feelings by myself; I don't need you to do it for me. I mean, I'd rather a hug, if it's all the same to you. Or a small dog. Can I trade my family for a small dog?