Michelle Li

Lullabies for Extinct Things

for Imy Gao

Like the last image of my mother blowing a kiss
toward the train biting the dusklight, like how we sat
bare-boned on the linoleum floor. Like the autumn
we knelt before grief and asked to shorten our lives.
When I went walking into the night, I think I had been
crying. The rain on the warm sidewalk, thickening into
fresh rivulets, gone under the drainage, clear and unforgiving;
piano music in the distance, the dampening sound like
a closing sigh. Sometimes I think despair is master of all
things living. What it must mean to loosen the bones, unhinge
the mind of youth, of ambition—houses dilapidated years down
the line. Like the darkness when I ran up on the roof, and saw you
flicking the last fireflies into existence. The dots between
the buildings of light, going and going away.

Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Apprentice Writer. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writer's Workshop and her work is forthcoming or published in Aster Lit, wildscape. literary, and Third Wednesday. She edits for The Dawn Review and is executive editor of Hominum Journal, In addition, she plays violin and piano, loves Rachmaninoff and blackberries.