The streets are lined with glass trees
We weave through their false light
for a taste of a real moon, fold
secrets into telescope wings
where utopia is reachable
if you slumber for another million years.
At dusk, we follow bodies
like burning arrowheads, play
witnesses to every nightly procession,
every rainy wedding of the foxes.
We ping desire into the summer wind,
the lusty curtain of charcoal smoke, our bodies
heavy with want, stopping
on a leaf, a windowsill, a neon half-moon
under a club awning
We are the emerald necklace of light
laced around summer night.
Cloaked in autumn gold,
we cling to dried stalks, mouthless,
longing for home through a growing silver fog
Extinction is a dream
where we finally find a winter moon
to call our own
a paradise of spilling stars.
Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Uncanny, Lightspeed, khōréō, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu.bsky.social