The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Incidental Pollen by Ellen Austin-Li

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Incidental Pollen by Ellen Austin-Li (Madville Publishing 2025).

Lunar Triad

I’ve read motorcycle crashes surge
during supermoons—imagine
the lone biker on the road, wrapped
in the night sky, eyes drawn inexorably up
by the bright orb in its perigee, filling
the horizon, momentarily mesmerized
as the bike skids into the rails. We live
beneath a spell of light and shadow, though
its spectacle casts its net, captures us,
only under extraordinary circumstances.

II.

Early January’s Wolf Moon
tried to overshadow the later moon,
called her Snow in a mighty swallow.
But Snow’s fullness eclipsed
the Wolf’s howl, slipped entirely inside
Earth’s umbral shade, bled red
in the crushing jaws of atmosphere’s
bending light, transformed herself
into Blood Moon: warrior victorious.

III.

O late January moon, who
do you want to be? Siren, shadow, beacon,
or bloodied? Your rare second appearance
paints you blue, your blueness
the end of a melancholy year,
a wash of sadness across a calendar
of loss passed in January last. Blue
flashes neon, a jazz saxophone’s notes
rising in wisps, a mournful ode
to those I won’t forget.

Ellen Austin-Li‘s debut collection, Incidental Pollen—a 2023 Trio Award finalist, 2024 Wisconsin Poetry Series semi-finalist, and runner-up to the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize—is forthcoming (May 2025) from Madville Publishing. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks Firefly and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic. Ellen is a Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominated poet whose work appears in many journals and anthologies, such as Salamander, One Art, The Maine Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Rust & Moth. SAFTA has supported her work. Ellen curates the monthly reading series Poetry Night at Sitwell’s in Cincinnati, where she shares an empty nest with her husband.

Layla Lenhardt is the author of the full-length poetry collection Mother Tongue (Main Street Rag 2023). She is an alumna of the Firefly Farms Residency and a member of the Sundress Reader Board. She is currently working on her second full length poetry collection Little Spoon, and she is an MFA candidate at IU.