I heard your voice for the first time after you died your voice sounded clear as I knelt in the snow you died and I knelt on an extra-large ski parka in the snow it was an unclaimed parka so I knelt on maybe our nephew Jeffery’s who we lost eight years ago and I […]
Ellen Austin-Li
Ellen Austin-Li’s 2025 debut collection, Incidental Pollen, is the runner-up to Madville Publishing’s Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Firefly and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic. Ellen is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated poet whose work appears in many places, including SWIMM, Salamander, The Maine Review, Lily Poetry Review, and One Art. Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) has supported her work. Ellen holds an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice program. She curates the reading series Poetry at Artifact at Sitwell’s in Cincinnati, where she lives. Find her here: https://ellenaustinli.me/
Winter Birth
Winter is not a season but my glacial womb, the blue ice that festoons my shoes, my toes tapping as I croon: moon, moon, send us some snow! I will not be born, cannot live until a blizzard comes, my father chopping blocks frozen by the side door, my mother’s contractions […]
Pica
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 […]