Moments, an announcement, and a dedication
Eight Years Old in the Corn Rows
Racing down the alley of August,
I slow as I am alone
among the rows, hidden
in our game of hide-n-seek
on Nana’s farm. Timeless
summer. The stalks rustle
and the breeze kisses my bare arms,
fine hairs lift as my body cools.
Silence as the in-between stillness
settles. There, a monarch,
russet and black-rimmed, lands. I swear
I hear its wings flutter.
Cicadas crescendo when the sun burns
between cloud cover. I hear
one of my brothers or sisters’
footfalls nearby, then retreating. Hush‒‒
the wind rushes around me.
I will stay forever.
*published in Of Rust and Glass, the Awakenings Issue No. 15, 2024
Of Rust and Glass, the Awakenings Issue.
I’m announcing that my first full-length poetry collection, Incidental Pollen—2023 Trio Award finalist, 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize runner-up—is forthcoming from Madville Publishing in May 2025. I’m astonished and grateful to the contest poetry readers (Joshua Rogers & Darius Stewart) and contest judge Marilyn Kallet (Poet Laureate Emeritus of Knoxville, TN) for recognizing my manuscript in this way. I am also thrilled to work with a women-led press (Founding Director Kim Davis and Poetry Editor Linda Parsons). Mostly, though, I’m grateful to bring this particular collection of poems dedicated to my father and nephew into the world.
Announcements have this nagging way of showing you how absent you have been from certain spaces. My intention to post a new blog entry every month has clearly fallen away. I have been hiding in these corn rows, brought back to those early years, as I navigate some difficult emotional territory. The formative years live so deeply in me that sometimes I believe I am back there, with all the people I love most in the world—especially my brothers and sisters—nearby. I know they’re there. I may not be able to see them, but I hear them so close I believe I can touch them. These moments are the most important to me. Composing poems is the closest I can come to capturing the ephemeral —sharing the sacred so I can fix it in time and space—and perhaps touch someone else at the same time.
My family of origin lost our brilliant and gentle father in December 2017. At age 93, his death was expected and (thankfully) peaceful. Just three weeks later, we suddenly lost my talented and equally gentle nephew, Jeffery Cox—my sister’s son—under traumatic circumstances. These losses feel like a lifetime ago to me (I’m sure my experience of loss is different from others in the family), but they weren’t. In many ways, these first significant losses had an outsized impact on all of us. I’ve been carrying these poems around for several years; it’s finally time to let them go into the world with the dedication page that’s been fixed in place since the book’s inception.
Ellen Austin-Li 