Better Days

Better Days - Michelle Li (Westwood High School, 11th Grade)

What brings you homeward to these stilled days—

at this bedridden hour too? The months have lazed

together since your departure, and in my dreams,

you marry someone else. It’s incredible to think

that the world, unprovisioned for, goes on without

everything leaving: when I open my door underneath

the threaded moonlight, the crepuscular plovers, even in

their final flight, are concrete against the blackened sky,

and the dusk-bitten hills are flattened but not gone.

I had been upset before, and what continuously ruins me

is the displacement of a body through sorrow, the broken

necks of flowers on my window sill. Some days,

I cannot bear to lift my own neck, cannot think about

your leaving apart from my lessening. Because I have never

known love to be weak, I took it to mean that I was.

My solitude, the incomprehensibility of a continuum, foreignness

of your salt-lit body, heightened foolishness of renewal—

my mother said that this would eventually

kill me, and so I have been sick for a long time, trying to fix myself.

Sometimes at night, I can remember how she looked before

she died: flaxen hair and always angry, but I can never stop hoping

in you—promise me you will stay from the blushing of February to watch the ghost

crabs by the water next February, skirting across the sand.

Wipe the sweat off of my forehead, swallow my dashed hope—

the nights are swollen above bitter waves, they come and go.

We’ll have wheat bread underneath stilted rain, turn over all the sunsets.

My beloved, love is a wretched thing, but I will ask you to stay, all the same.

Accept me. I have given everything you could have asked.