Baby bird in the bushes, I scooped
handfuls of dirt, the minerals the body
craved at my fingertips. Taste of metal,
the earth’s iron, hand to mouth,
one gritty girl. I was
fed by the soil. Then, a proclivity
for paper captured on film, crawling
Christmas morning in heaven,
grazing the wasteland of wrapping
paper scraps. We eat what we need.
The ground and the seed:
a forest already growing inside me.
Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, Rust + Moth, and other places. Finishing Line Press published her two chapbooks—Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). A Best of the Net nominee and a Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship recipient, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives with her husband in a newly empty nest. You can find more of her work at www.ellenaustinli.me.