“You Shouldn’t Have All of This” by Michelle Li
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “You Shouldn’t Have All of This” by Michelle Li.
You Shouldn’t Have All of This
By Michelle Li
In the year we fell apart, I watched her post polaroids without me
online. Those honey-eyed afternoons when even the leaves distorted
themselves: sidewalk cracks large enough to swallow my leaving,
how everyone wants to be somebody & to go to Princeton, violin
rehearsal after school, the epiphany that if I couldn’t learn to love
myself, I might die from misery. All these sorrows, I knew they were mine.
Always, at odd times, I am left kneeling in strange places, sobbing into
a bout of gentle wind, churning candlelight into the frame of a self-portrait.
Nothing makes sense when it’s under my fingertips, even less when
I’ve martyred the color of autumn into a punctum of wariness.
For so long, my greatest dream has been to cocoon my waiting body
into sleep, wait for the sway and gentle patter of spring rain.
Say it’s September’s prelude. Say, once in class, she told me I was half
her worth. You shouldn’t have all of this; she might as well have shoved
my body against the wall and slapped a forever eulogy into my cheekbones.
I knew what she meant: my grandparents’ cooking, my father’s timid
kindness, this life of plentiful bounty to rot—that I was undeserving
of a life to begin with. Of course, I understood it. The rule of girlhood is
that you are born too soft: weathered into seasonal compliance, cuffed down by
merciless repentance, unburdened by the metamorphosis to oblivion.
The rule of poetry is to make everything about yourself: after that, I
purposefully stood in crowded rooms just to see how important everyone
could be. I am sorry to report what I learned: you can laugh and cry
with someone for years, only to realize while you are regressing into loitering
mothlight, the earth spins on its axis, and another fully formed spine hardens,
expands its wings in fair weather, flocks south to be noticed.
The only thing I could give worth having was the knowledge
that there was nothing to offer anymore. Do you know you are everything?
a poet once asked me. I pick myself up from the embrace of wet tar,
the feeble trickle of kindness, feel for my heartbeat under layers of
crystallised skeleton, and began to laugh sadly in this dream.
Copyright © Michelle Li
Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Narrative Magazine. 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, The Penn Review, 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.
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