In a field of flowers, I rest by Elizabeth Li (16, Canada)

like a flower ensnared by a weed,
I am a child strangled by the future
in this field of pastel watercolor, I sink to my knees
Asphyxiation.

blood sloshes in the veins 
between my ears; there is a pounding in my skull as
faces spill into my head, young and familiar
laughing. I don’t need to run my finger along
the curve of your smile to know
every intimate line of your expression
yet now? you wear a stranger’s face. maybe that’s just
who you are.

---

grass tickles my collarbone as I
collapse, writhing and aching and craving
respite, from the heaviness of all I have lost, all I still stand to lose
the inevitability of grief burns
like whiskey in my lungs
from the bottle we spun in your basement, high off the adrenaline
of our crime. it won’t be a crime soon. it will never burn the same.

my chest tightens and strains
on the verge of collapse. frustration and fury seize my bones and
I slam my fists against the unfeeling earth,
a silent airless scream tearing from my lips, demanding the world
to stop spinning on its axis. to give me back those
placid days, sitting side-by-side on carpet
earbuds split between the two of us, sharing the worn lyrics of a musical
we’ve heard a thousand times. lyrics that now have blanks in my head, lines that tether into 
nothingness, my mind fumbling to complete each phrase. my fingers scrabble at my seizing throat
trying to find the words. 

my head goes underwater, or so it feels
distantly, through this cocoon of heavy silence: a whisper of music 
how vivid the memory had been: him and me playing duet on piano
you and her singing along on guitar
sworls of sound swelling through the hall
in a whirl of kaleidoscopic color; the euphony tasted of ambrosia
yet the memory comes to me now
like a faded photograph, with washed-out colors and out-of-tune notes;
Hiraeth
it is a bittersweet word, I think
as I sink into the earth.

let me frolic through these fields
from the afterlife. braid flowers into hair
now likely cut short or curled or dyed
atop a stranger’s head
let me lie in peace 
beside 
their eternal 
corpses
my eyes flutter closed: bury me amongst my ghosts.