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    • Beal, Jane
    • Burch, Beverly
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YOUR CART

Xiaoly Li

Moonlight Walk

The moon, a perfect half circle. No other stars
visible except Jupiter in the southern sky, and star lights
from the curtained houses with shadows moving
across a blue-shaded room. What story [happy]

| [boring] | [frozen] is going on when the moon is listening?
So do you, the lonely walker, listen [without a mask]
among the silhouette of trees. The continuous
drumming of cicadas, the mooing of a bull-

frog, fill the quiet, warm twilight. Ardor, you think
[yearn]. There is one body [long ignored]
you experience now—whose steps, whose sense
of moon touch, whose flow, whose satisfaction of being

occupied [noticed] [loved]. On the open road, the walker
continues with the moon, and the latest and last lover.
 
Sept / Oct  2023

Xiaoly Li
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 is forthcoming, featured, or anthologized in Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, PANK, Chautauqua, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, twice a Pushcart Prize, three times Best of the Net. 
Art: Cam Pietralunga. Earth Moving Heavy Equipment for Construction. Acrylic on canvas. 
  
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