Issue 32: Georgia San Li

Small Galaxies for Breakfast

this poem is not a dead

line, only desire in my red glass

spire, a lumiere of perfume to tip

onto my finger and enter

vapors of terra nua, a parasite

burrowing into my novel where I am

sitting with my head in my hands

speculating sideways, as she worms

her way into the belly of the

belly where I store my hoard

of moons, texta by

texta, opening my hidden pockets

with a fist of meteors, no longer a

vestige of FF 48, I take a bite of

its drip drip dangling, its last bit

of Jupiter with my third dunk of

tea, but feel here—be

gentle – we are at the aureole

Crystalline & Amorphous Solids

tsundoku defies logic, a library

of mordant moorings, books you

collect strewn & stacked into

an object of desire to enter a gateway

and invite disturbance, texta by texta

an understanding that senses the

marred driftwood dissolving into

silts of gurgling sulfur cradled in

lunar craters of pink

iridescence, all that is left of white retroscape

that was once flush with the gush of wild

rivers, throngs of goldfish,

as limestone and chaparral mark the

perimeter, and the margins grow

blank with meaning, margins of space,

an irascible octopus with spotted

architecture that defends itself

by disappearing

Currently, Georgia San Li is at work on poetry and Untitled: a Portrait from the Tarmac, a novel. Her poetry was shortlisted for the 2023 Oxford Poetry prize and appears or is forthcoming in, e.g., Antigonish, Atlanta Review, Confluence (UK), Glacier, La Piccioletta Barca, LIT Magazine, Litro (UK), Ravensperch, The Missouri Review and Willow Springs. She is the author of Wandering, a poetry chapbook, Minerva Rising finalist (FLP 2024). She has been supported by the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley and the Kenyon Review in both poetry and fiction.

Copyright © 2024 by Georgia San Li, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author