Tell me, God by Hilary Tam (14, Hong Kong)

​Even if you are
A God, there is still eternity before daybreak.
There is still no way to tell your flesh from mine, coalescing into a cityscape of
The forgotten; their children cry in your bosom and young girls fuse themselves
to your
​spine.

---

​Look at you– you are the inferno that blazes for a wide-eyed woman and dons an orange halo
of sin,
Such exquisiteness – you do not know
How many artisans ache to press your shadow into alabaster, how many poets bleed your
words onto paper.
Soon I will be another with carmine stars littering my trail and painting a broken torso; I will
have to find solace between your teeth and music in haemorrhage
But if fear was a choice I would not be afraid of you:
You are the one with terror in your irises, silt running down your cheeks and men climbing
your ribs with threats to conquer–a mountain of gravestones
Tell me, do you kill for the hunger? Is there rhyme and reason in the paragons you hurl
into the smog like petals, behind the way you curl folklore into your tongue–
Burnt bodies cannot recreate the warmth of late spring, a mother’s breath
And the one deity you worship denies you asylum in a coffin, twilights you beg to be
transient lacerating a heart still beating, treacherously beating –
Maybe this deathlessness is killing you.