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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
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