Amy Li
I Calculate Grief in Seconds
I mouth a body, then an elegy. As if our hollow
is enough to hold our limbs tangent as shorelines.
I run. I scrub my tongue until it bleeds and count seconds
and throw glass out windows and kill butterflies simply
for existing. I paint layers of bitter mint atop your burnt
sugar, submerged midnight, body-smothered-as-bird
could-have-been-except-we-couldn’t-part-the-tide-
like-Moses-you-should’ve-been-Moses-but-instead-you-are-
a-woman taste. I have belonged to grief in this lifetime, watched
the clocks until they peeled from the walls & intoxicated
me with their bare hands. I run not because I’m being chased but because I like
the burn. All the corpses around me are kaleidoscopes of blue. Butterfly wings
now black butter soup for the birds to pick at. My fingers tap syllables
sounding like celebration, but you know better. The world whirs,
whizzes, colors fractured at their lineages. Families and families
of faces. I close my eyes and there’s a kaleidoscope of light.
I open them and there’s a kaleidoscope on the processes of dying. All the bodies I know
are always already buried when I get there, but I like to blame that
on traffic. I realize all the glass has already been thrown out the windows,
so I sit criss-cross-apple-sauce & pop bubble wrap like bubble
gum & I am the power of the kind of indirection that doesn’t
bleed & such is the sum of daughter, and daughter.
is enough to hold our limbs tangent as shorelines.
I run. I scrub my tongue until it bleeds and count seconds
and throw glass out windows and kill butterflies simply
for existing. I paint layers of bitter mint atop your burnt
sugar, submerged midnight, body-smothered-as-bird
could-have-been-except-we-couldn’t-part-the-tide-
like-Moses-you-should’ve-been-Moses-but-instead-you-are-
a-woman taste. I have belonged to grief in this lifetime, watched
the clocks until they peeled from the walls & intoxicated
me with their bare hands. I run not because I’m being chased but because I like
the burn. All the corpses around me are kaleidoscopes of blue. Butterfly wings
now black butter soup for the birds to pick at. My fingers tap syllables
sounding like celebration, but you know better. The world whirs,
whizzes, colors fractured at their lineages. Families and families
of faces. I close my eyes and there’s a kaleidoscope of light.
I open them and there’s a kaleidoscope on the processes of dying. All the bodies I know
are always already buried when I get there, but I like to blame that
on traffic. I realize all the glass has already been thrown out the windows,
so I sit criss-cross-apple-sauce & pop bubble wrap like bubble
gum & I am the power of the kind of indirection that doesn’t
bleed & such is the sum of daughter, and daughter.
Biography
Amy Li (she/her) is a young writer and artist from Georgia. She edits for The Augment Review, and her work appears in or is forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Lumiere Review, and Biological Creatures, among others. Though her favorite activity is probably procrastinating, she also adores winter walks, binging TV shows, and sweet tea.
