Read More: A brief Q&A with Xiaoly Li
Our Generation
We were born after my parents’ return from the forgotten war,
when mothers with multiple children were hailed as heroes.
I survived not by maternal milk but by plucking wild vegetables
when famine persisted for years.
When our schooling days ceased from the Cultural
Revolution, we roamed streets, shouting His slogans.
When we reached our late teens, we toiled the countryside.
Our hands calloused, feet soiled, in fields and pigsties.
When in our youth, love became taboo. Girls and boys stayed
segregated. We name-called a girl who bit the forbidden.
When in our maturity, the marriage age defined, and one child
decreed. Like ancient women’s feet, each step a wound.
Beneath sycamore’s purple blooms, I dreamt of flight,
chasing blue jays through boundless skies, unfazed by fate.
My Popo Talks to the Air
Her finger points to the empty chair,
She curses someone not there. […]
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Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry collection manuscript, Touching Horizons (Between the Sun and the Moon) was a finalist of 2023 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests. Her poetry is featured, or anthologized in Verse Daily, diode, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, PANK, Chautauqua, Rhino, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, three times a Pushcart Prize, four times Best of the Net. She lives in Massachusetts where her photography has been shown and sold in galleries in Boston. Xiaoly received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and her Master’s in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China. For additional information, please reference her website: xiaolyli.art
Read More: A brief Q&A with Xiaoly Li