did you know, when we died our mothers labeled it by Vivian Huang* (16, California)

blessed? our hands were once intertwined over valleys
as we tongued the wisps that drizzle from the moon, fingers
twitching as our legs moved us across galaxies, running
until our stoned calves burnt like a feather in a volcano, euphoric
-drunk from the isolation we hammered into the world when the sky
was eclipsed. but we learned: night turns moon into sun, and
​the dazed skies oxidize into poison they force us 

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to drink (drink drink) until our hands are minced & we are falling,
forgetting our fingers were ever part of another palm line. i once
imagined what it would be like if our bodies were still stringed
together, twisted, curled in with soft-knit rope, but i watched
our mothers hide your carcass away from mine, and it suddenly
seemed impossible to see us hand in hand, noses pressed against
drumming chests. our faces buried (burnt, stamped, scored
with a knife they carved from mahogany) inside the planets
that churn inside the separate universes we once existed
​without a ghosted touch.