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Sub Urban: “Cradles”

Bishop Briggs: “River”

White Stripes: “Hardest Button to Button”

Gogol Bordello: “Sally”

Milk and Bone: “Peaches”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “Red Right Hand”

To Cori and Lana

Lost in Hell, Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee;

Say to her, “My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here”

—Edna St Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

The bleeding heart is a pink and white flower that bears a striking resemblance to the conventional heart shape It is also referred to as the heart flower or as lady-in-bath

The flower is known to be poisonous to the touch and deadly to consume

And, like the

My love story started with a death

With the sound ofon the hospice floor like delicate china

And Auntie Tilda, wilting inside her hospital bed, her breath rattling in her es like a penny

I soaked her hospital goith tears, clutching the fabric in et off her ill sister

“Please don’t leave, Auntie Please,” I croaked

The cancer had spread to her lungs, liver, and kidneys,for my aunt to breathe For the past feeeks, she’s slept sitting upright, falling in and out of consciousness

At twelve, death was an abstract concept tothat happened in other families, to other people

I understood what it meant now

Auntie Tilda was never going to scoop ers on ain

She’d never pick Belle and s full of apple slices and strawberries whenever our parents worked long hours

She’d never braid ods and three-headed monsters