KJ Li

Catalog of Unearned Gratitudes

—After heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

On the back page news: profiles of chicken-catchers who, owing
to their labor, developed incurable swelling in their knuckles

that I might fill my mouth with cheap meat, a father trembles
to lift his child’s spoon to fill their mouth

not until years later will the child learn
to call this weakness

that I might flit from shade to shade, feet shielded
from sharp sun & stone, invisible waste fills the bloodlines

of every fellow animal, children’s feet salt and harden in the unrelenting
air—their names added to the catalog of things I will never know

I didn’t know until years after leaving that when a girl became
pregnant at my school she was asked to leave

to another place, that the rest of us might learn
undisturbed by life itself—

in our teachers’ eyes, our ignorance a coin
as precious as any violence

knowledge itself can never
rupture paradise, only exact its price

every day my catalog only grows: the language for every harm born
& borne that I might sit here, head bent against the sun,

& write these words, splendid & not, alike
each stroke weighted by uncounted

lives spent bearing against the dark, yet in
my unearned hands, lighter even

than a child’s spoon

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KJ Li is an LGBT+ Chinese-American raised in central Texas. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she takes long walks and misses the family cat. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shade Journal, Overheard Lit, Chestnut Review and others—more can be found at https://kjli.carrd.co/.