This palette of oak grows with a marbling of pale green lichen to frame its pain. Sculpted on a trunk, two swirling burls, a bulging body and a face with the tough skin of bark. A dappling of color to offset despair. And what of the ivy that twines towards this sight? An Almighty mind- shift against survival of the fittest? The unseen hand scrapes beauty out of wounds, injury as medium, near-death the instrument of the master. The features poised uppermost on the tree express wonder broken-free of the soil at her feet, eyes half-closed in reverie, mouth open in an “O”— Oh, I’ve known this sort of wonder, metal staples holding together the skin of life, this scar I wear on my torso.
Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, and other places. Her first chapbook, Firefly, was published by Finishing Line Press (2019); her second chapbook, Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic, is forthcoming (FLP 2021). A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship in Poetry, she is an MFA candidate at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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