You Li

Back When You Were a Lifer

We were wearing out B’s clunker on the haunted highways

B got us out of the city then we’d tell jokes to stay

Awake passing hours of blocked lanes’ hypnotic flashing lights 

Even in snow we’d make it because they know snow in Michigan

I was thinking in ten more years where would I be living   

What routes would I trace to Rome New York’s toxic waste site

Then you were getting out and my imaginings shifted

B and I bringing you to the farm stand by the prison

You picking out fresh fruits touching grass holding a pumpkin

Crossing a large field what if we walked any path you liked

What if we walked all the way down the state back to Brooklyn

When you were a lifer I wondered when I’d feel like H

Who feels not like an advocate but a desperate daughter

What if I wrote to all the parole board officers she says

What if I called to explain why you’re extraordinary

I was reading this short story that makes you the reader

Grow to love and grieve this girl who dies in a freak car crash

When it reveals it’s not her but her friend you feel relief

When it all flips and you walk out of prison with your pack

Of twenty years of appeals and unflanked like a vision

I want B to drive us three as fast as we can away

I want to find the world’s most beautiful cup want to have

Blown the cup from glass until it found its true form fill it

With the cleanest water to give you to drink and another

You Li is a lawyer and poet who was born in Beijing, grew up in central Illinois and Philadelphia, and lives in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, THE BOILER, Shenandoah, Poetry South, and elsewhere. She has received the E. E. Cummings Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the Morris W. Croll Poetry Prize from Princeton University. A Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study scholarship recipient, she serves as a reader for Pleiades Magazine.