SmokeLong Quarterly

When you’re hungry enough, you eat your baby; this is why you should always have three sacks of rice and five tubs of pork sung to get stuck between your teeth, so I am told as I stare down my chest, milk dribbling from a nipple like neglected ice cream, racing the baby for who eats whom first, and though I am sore, my arms heavy, my back like the IKEA ceramic plates that chipped when I placed them on the glass microwave tray, I think instead of the class hamster who birthed a litter and snacked on her young like pistachios, cracked and full of meat, despite us providing a bowl full of pellets and sunflower seeds which I had snuck from the snack cabinet and peeled open with my teeth, imagining myself a savior of the children, though at the time, I had not known I could starve my own by controlling my milk supply like a water clock, permitting one drop at a time into a cup else letting them wash down the drain until my skin dried, after which I eye the rice, wondering if I can eat the grains raw, skip the cooking time and the steam burning my knuckles, efficiently implement a fuel conversion algorithm to synthesize milk so the baby stops taking from my blood and bones, soothes my darting eyes from fridge to cabinet to packs of Fu Ling Bing scattered on the table, counting the seconds until we’re more empty than full.