Twining the still-deep-green oak,
Boston ivy first bleeds crimson, tipping the season.
News scatters like autumn leaves, polling shows
nearly forty percent await doomsday.
Some seek bunkers, grave’s deep.
Some stock piling. More preppers.
Under hurried wheels, three baby turtles flattened.
On divided streets, campaign signs sprout like mushrooms.
Some neighbors wave across fences, still friends.
Passersby stop to play with our dogs.
One just renewed her license at one hundred.
You look only seventy, standing so straight! I say.
She raised her grandchildren, her daughter says.
The elder woman spreads her arms wide toward blue.
Your land birthed an immortal poet, she says.
Her voice trembles with Li Bai’s song:
Moonlight before my bed,
seems frost upon the ground…
Looking up, I see oak leaves drift in copper-gold,
a monarch flutters past the Hunter’s Moon.
Bowing down, I wonder—
When will its wings tip the world?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 4.
Xiaoly Li is a 2022 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant in Poetry. Her poetry collection Every Single Bird Rising is forthcoming with FutureCycle Press (2023). Her poetry has appeared in Spillway, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, Rhino, and elsewhere.
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