The year of undreaming

KJ Li

Often now I wake to this: the lights still
switched off, bathroom sink darkened
full of orchids that send up warnings
I disregard. What I wanted
was the bouquet peeled back to expose
the red mouth emptied of mercy,
the litany of inconvenient facts. Like

the moonbeam you slipped behind my ear
with my eyes closed, which was a blade
out of bloom. That most stars
are not, in fact, dead by the time
their light arrows into ours — they’re burning
live-hot in the blackest room, waiting for you
to find your way back. But I’ve come to think

in a truer sense they’ve always been dead, deader
than the fox skull in our underbrush
you could never bring yourself to touch —
someplace beyond alive or not, the furthest
point from us you could get
while still sharing a lineage. Maybe
it’s still comforting to think that no matter

the massive dying years between us,
in the longest run we’re the same kind
of small, hurtling inevitably back
to the same place unwitnessed flowerings go.
I’ve been trying to sleep more, stop fixing
human eyes to every bright dead thing.
What I wanted to tell you: that black holes

don’t mean to destroy what makes them,
it’s only they can’t bear to part with
what they’ve been given. In another
universe I get what I ask for: black hole
burial, my body finally put someplace
safe, made perfect and unattainable. Here

in this unconquerable night, I cast
my hand through the air still molded
after memory, tuck the last
secrets you gave me into the glare
of the bedroom mirror. Everywhere
I see the signs of all the things
too precious to keep or

surrender to, the light of your leaving
forever hanging
on the cusp
of what can’t be taken back.