Lindsay Li

interim

for my brother


After you left, I found
words I could not say
for fear of melting them

down in my mouth like ice.
Vanilla, poltergeist, paramour.
Words whose beauty slipped

away beneath the dark lake
of a half-life—where beauty goes
once we no longer recognize it.

Cacophony. Serendipity. You
said I had a storybook
for a mind, but in the moment

where it mattered most, I could
only hack out a curse, as if
I’d swallowed tumbleweeds

instead of ink. Incandescent.
All my life, I sought beautiful
passages to watch flutter, like moths

across a bathroom mirror, buzzing
hollow-eyed at their own reflection.
When my vocabulary failed me

I’d search up synonyms for beautiful
and later the moments that could
almost quantify you. Idyllic, petrichor.

It was raining when you left, as if
this were all a show on a channel
I was too dazed to switch off. I stayed

on the porch, in the mellow warmth,
dictionary torn and ripped in the street
between us, pages shuddering like

silken wings, a whole sky of moths.
I still can’t find the prettiest word for loss.

Lindsay Li is a Chinese American writer based in the Bay Area. In her free time, she attempts to unite history with the coming future, goes down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and writes anything that comes to mind.