Anni Liu


Northeast Kingdom

Summer makes haloes of our faces,

light-chapped as we bathe near the sharp-

 

lipped rocks, ice our beers in snowmelt.

If we stay, we could make a life for ourselves

 

in this place named for its dead

ends, its trailers and trucks left gutted

 

and raw on their sides, half-buried by years

of tall grass. On the farm, a single crimson tree.

 

The sheep graze, milk-eyed and solemn

as children. We keep our books closed,

 

not marking time except by the bloom

of mold on the thistle-wrapped cheeses

 

ripening in the cellar’s vinegared dark.

At the end of an unmarked trails, you’ll find

 

a lake called Shadow where I swam naked

for the first time, shoulders cloaked in pondweed

 

and stars. A mile from the border, among the grey-

eyed juncos and cattle, no one knows my name.


Anni Liu is a writer and translator from Xi’an, Shaanxi, and Bowling Green, Ohio. Her honors include an Undocupoets Fellowship and a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Bread Loaf Environmental Conference. Her work is published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Waxwing, Cream City Review, The Journal, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Indiana University where she has served as Poetry Editor of Indiana Review.