Written by Iris Zhu from Deerfield Academy, Massachusetts, USA I am woken by the grey that muffles the sky. On my bedside the candle burns white as light– melting, melting; its supple wax, like sweat dried into salt turns an opaque, rigor mortis stiff. The great huffing and puffing of man, it curls like a sigh of frost seeping over a morning meadow– out from the esophagus of metal organs, out into the miserable evening stretched against night. It licks gilded, gum-sticky hand
