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.