Grace Li

plastic bag

it hangs in the thick
air, an homage
to short-term memory,

a wrinkled sneeze
still held against release.
the day rolls down

its dispenser, o heavy day
and there is no such
thing called wind, instead

the passing anger
of a car punts it down
the sun-slicked aisles. who

can ignore the heat spilling
into the unremarkable
buildings, the high halls

where there must be
people, wasted and not
alone. it is the easy debris

of their lives, this ragged
phantom tumbling through
the laundry of motor oil.

the drunken street veers
straight into the horizon
as if there is no other

choice. it follows in
the foreground,
a trailing comma

between parking lots
and drains and no
easy ends. bird-snatcher, sea-

choker, punctured with
light, this tangled
mass, the color of

convenience. it is shaped
like something familiar,
the pitch and yaw of it,

how it heaves and blows.
for all its uselessness,
the easy spillage of

what it once carried,
it is not yet dead
and, nudged on by whatever

is left of Newtonian
order in this world, it lurches
further down the road

within a foot of where I stand— there
is the sound of a bicycle and then
it lifts like sudden rain.

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Grace Li is a Californian writer, currently attending the MFA program in poetry at San Diego State University, and a UCLA alum. Her poems can be found in Los Angeles Review, Red Wheelbarrow and Westwind Journal of the Arts.