"The Keeper No. 3" by Julie Epp
Michelle Li | Golden Shovel for Eileen Wu
“Crabs are stunning, their flesh soft pink, // their sweet revenge for the broiled // dream of my parents — this story without end.”
--Erik Solvanger’s I gather up the lumps in my throat, scrape…
But all of this is true, I am telling you. Forget the crabs
alive in the time we were younger, ghost pinchers failing—their bodies are
reduced to seaside salt now. Childhood is a slack-jawed mouth: stunning
& stunned tense & crying for small life—I’m telling you about their
lives because I don’t know how to remember mine. How you can season flesh
to its barest form, how to bare your fangs against a bout of soft
wind that is more unkind than it seems, this I was taught. On schooldays, you wear pink
in its maiden form: dresses, hairclips, heartbeats and knees in their
scraped discoloration. The pea gravel under the set of money bars tastes of a sweet-
ness. I recall everything in grade school with a bruise-like clarity: the tasteful revenge
of children trying on anger like breath, often too young to know what for,
rolling of the knuckles, the sky in a fist-fight of color, and we walk sidewalks with the
bicycles of many sluggish years down hill after hill, where you and I lay broiled,
pale-skinned under the sun. This is where I pick up my broken radius bone, project a dream
sequence onto a plastic film roll, wretchedly believe that endings are only played after the best of
moves. Yesterday I went driving in the dark, wide-eyed, through the great chessboard of my
life. From the street across your house, I stopped the car to drink light by the handful. My parents
wait at home until the next minty dawn, wonder about their daughter; I mourn. All of this
is true, I swear it. I have been trying to make my life do my bidding, cut off the ending of a story
to spare its beauty. In pain, all youth begins to blossom into collateral veins, without
any true reason. My arrival is never on time, so I watch the love, like sunset, in its end.
--Erik Solvanger’s I gather up the lumps in my throat, scrape…
But all of this is true, I am telling you. Forget the crabs
alive in the time we were younger, ghost pinchers failing—their bodies are
reduced to seaside salt now. Childhood is a slack-jawed mouth: stunning
& stunned tense & crying for small life—I’m telling you about their
lives because I don’t know how to remember mine. How you can season flesh
to its barest form, how to bare your fangs against a bout of soft
wind that is more unkind than it seems, this I was taught. On schooldays, you wear pink
in its maiden form: dresses, hairclips, heartbeats and knees in their
scraped discoloration. The pea gravel under the set of money bars tastes of a sweet-
ness. I recall everything in grade school with a bruise-like clarity: the tasteful revenge
of children trying on anger like breath, often too young to know what for,
rolling of the knuckles, the sky in a fist-fight of color, and we walk sidewalks with the
bicycles of many sluggish years down hill after hill, where you and I lay broiled,
pale-skinned under the sun. This is where I pick up my broken radius bone, project a dream
sequence onto a plastic film roll, wretchedly believe that endings are only played after the best of
moves. Yesterday I went driving in the dark, wide-eyed, through the great chessboard of my
life. From the street across your house, I stopped the car to drink light by the handful. My parents
wait at home until the next minty dawn, wonder about their daughter; I mourn. All of this
is true, I swear it. I have been trying to make my life do my bidding, cut off the ending of a story
to spare its beauty. In pain, all youth begins to blossom into collateral veins, without
any true reason. My arrival is never on time, so I watch the love, like sunset, in its end.
Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Apprentice Writer. An alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writer's Workshop, her work is published in Aster Lit, wildscape. literary, and Third Wednesday. You can find her at michelleli.carrd.co.
Julie Epp is a watercolour artist based in Metro Vancouver whose intimate, dreamlike paintings explore hidden emotions and the shifting layers of identity. Through delicate, surreal imagery, she reflects on what is lost, buried, or unspoken within us. Her work invites stillness and self-examination, offering viewers a quiet space to reconnect with their inner world. http://www.julilyart.com/
