Introducing our very first Future Friday–a showcase of talent 18 and under.

Grace Q. Song is 16 years old and a Chinese-American writer from New York. A high school junior, she enjoys photography and indie music. She thinks you’re awesome.

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DEAD FISH SYNDROME

They came at dawn—
blue fish, amber fish, silver fish.
After the tide slipped away, I walked
past overturned boats
to where the ocean buried them—
eight, nine, ten in acid seaweed.
The sea cannot carry all of its dead
forever. A body hurts to touch
my sister tells me, so we never touched.
Our hands returned to salt
& shipwrecked light stole eyes
devoured bones, tore scale after scale until
the gulls must have mistaken them
for broken white shells.
These days, I leave the piano covered.
I don’t know where I’ve hidden myself
in these minor keys. I don’t know why
this music box & everything I want to hold   cut
into my skin like those crimson-serrated gills.
I am so in love,        so lonely,
I could fill the ocean with this song.

SISTER, YOU CALL ME A BITCH

& the wilderness lures us
into its jaws.
But this story,
I devour the land
alive
& leave no bone
to the vultures.
Here are the knives I throw
into your thorn-
plum shoulder.
Here is the name
you brand on my cheek.
Its vowels fester
in my belly.
Look, sister: I break
my fingers for you. I crush
my ribs for you.
I wear these wounds
as a second skin
& bathe myself
in carnivore
darkness.

THE BOYS PLAY FRISBEE BAREFOOT

& grass clings to their toes
like dew to sunrise.

I can name this afternoon as a memory
in a brief, summer blink

& I must tell my sister to doubt
the world I’ve given her.

She says I am not sick
& I know she loves this lie—

counts her bones as sheep.
The boys wear sweat as rain

roam the olive hairs of the earth
as a fuzzy rug that curls

against the rough of their feet.
I hold my sister as a stranger—

unforgivable—
watch a white disk

cut a horizon
across the sky

as a swan
I know

is dead.