Ellen Austin-Li
Two Poems
Smoke
All I want is a tiny cottage
on the Dingle Peninsula. I could live
in peace on this windswept green.
America doesn’t own me anymore.
I’d rather fly to family via Aer Lingus than drive
up Ohio, across Pennsylvania, to New York.
I’m done passing the billboards
on 71N in Ohio, the Ten Commandments
split between two canvases alongside
the barn, the Confederate flag painted
on its roof. I don’t wish to be reminded
by the sign on the trip back that “Hell Is Real.”
Hell, yeah, it’s real. America is aflame.
With each wildfire season, the West
gets torched, fueled by the superheat
of our heedless need. Cities are coals of unrest,
Black sons & daughters gunned down as if prey.
Give me the Wild Atlantic Way,
Ireland’s west coast instead. Let me puzzle
the Gaelic posted above the English,
let me turn into a pebbled drive
beside my pastel-painted home, let the hearth
be spirited with peat. Near the coast,
standing stones frame a doorway
the ancients believed you pass through
into another world. My ancestors fled
Ireland because they were starving, I hunger
for this place to belong.
To Recapture Faith
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
—Thomas Merton
To reclaim even part of this vision
that has been wrenched from the center
of me, I must first let the light
reenter. To believe
in our ability to heal, I must let go
this consuming darkness.
I have lost my faith in humanity.
Outside last night, I heard a Bard
owl perched in the hemlock
accusing me, Et tu? Et tu?
This woman once existed
who sought stars on full-moon nights,
who chose cold air’s clarity
over its chill, who was certain angels
dwell and emerge from all people
as soon as they’re shown kindness.
When younger, I wanted this
shining world but pushed it away,
afraid, isolated with the bottle.
In middle-age, I’ve dismantled fear
enough times, it no longer rules me.
Eyes open, everyone I see runs hollow.
Radiance seems a relic of my imagination.
Show me again, owl, how to catch
the glimmer in the underbrush.
—Submitted on 11/25/2020
Ellen Austin-Li is the author of Firefly (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Artemis, Writers Tribe Review, The Maine Review, The New Verse News, Memoir Mixtapes, and other journals. Austin-Li is a student in the Solstice low-residency MFA program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Mass. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two sons.
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