Poetry: “Devotions” by Michelle Li
There is a multitude of reasons for us to write, and here, Michelle Li says one reason is that “I don’t know how to understand anything if not / through words.” She also explores the ongoing conversation about the relationship between suffering and making art. Does one need to be suffering in order to create? According to Li, it’s more like one feels deeply—”mourns,” loves incorrectly, kills fear, and “mark[s] the body for survival”—and thus must write. In this ars poetica, poetry is what we find “nested under / rotting leaves.”
Read Li’s poetry below.
Devotions
for my aunt
I was told the poet needs more than the sum of
her sorrow; outside, between restless birds in flight and flayed
out bullet wounds, I found the poem of my dreams nested under
rotting leaves. Having approached the gravesite, I sunk
my fingers into the volta, rubbed the dying matter between my thumbs.
From up close, I figure all our lives look terrible.
When the evening is ripe, grandmother sits at the kitchen table,
shakes her head, tells me to stop with the writing. I mourn.
Didn’t she know that it had kept me alive, offered me bread
when my limbs ached, spread my scraped chin across the
linoleum floor, asked me to look up at the remaining clutches
of stars? I don’t know how to understand anything if not
through words, how to write something if not
through pain. I remember sleeping against
the willows, loving everyone incorrectly. I’d forgotten how alive I
could be back then, and in those last moments of evening, I laughed
and killed fear and emptied what was left of a self-written elegy.
My final wish, the same as my first: to mark the body for survival.
March, going away, like a deadbeat father.
Michelle Li
Michelle Li (she/her) has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Apprentice Writer. An alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and the Adroit Summer Mentorship, her work is forthcoming or published in Up the Staircase Quarterly, wildscape. literary, and Frontier Poetry. She is editor in chief of Hominum Journal, editor of The Dawn Review, and reads for Palette Poetry. In addition, she plays violin and piano, loves Rachmaninoff, blackberries, and the rain.
