Let snow bury old Xu Fu Ji crispy peanut candies & half-digested rice. Sugar is better sent into earth than left to grow mold in a plastic bag. They tried to send me away, you know, like snow can hide footprints as much as it allows them to exist. Pretend you don’t see them: shadows, imprints, like Bigfoot marched through. Life might creep under crystals, absorbing syrup, desiccated coconut, refined colza oil, building breathing growing until their sky melts. Find me frozen, snappy limbs like silver fish bones, before I make it over, where problems are fixed just because we bury gold with wrappers—an unmarried scarecrow meant for mending, an inheritance of jewels wasted. I am not grass, unintentionally weeded yet without casualties. If only I could be like that, puncturing ice even before spring, instead I am strung like old wires on the zither, though they sounded beautiful once, still taut against the wood board hammered, glued, sanded in the basement, left there to play a dirge of silence, for daddy long legs & mice & bones to pirouette. The candies flake & crumble, but I rattle against bars waiting for rain to either flush away snow or freeze over. I didn’t eat them, the ground did, swallowed like a supernova—is the hope, transgressions forever hidden, so I can stay.
Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Lost Balloon, New Delta Review, EX/POST, Jet Fuel Review, Third Point Press, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Heavy Feather Review and assistant fiction editor for Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
Serotonin 