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 […]
Ellen Austin-Li
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.
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 […]