Georgia
San Li

Early definition, circa 1977

Are you Chinese? Are
you Japanese? my
classmates clamored out 

from the playground, walking
home from Mrs. Benasek’s
second grade room, asking,

unable to locate my 
origin, and from somewhere
I saw an Eskimo, how clever,

more intriguing, a human mystery,
no one would have guessed it,
soft kitten-fur framing

frostbitten cheeks, my pearls of
happy teeth, over-dressed 
in the ¾- sleeve glitter blue

dress my mother made from
what had caught my eye in
the remnant rack at

Parkway Plaza, the dress
for the first day of school 
shimmering in the winterless

gleaming sunshine, drifts of
snow moving in clouds, memory
of my aggrieved mother

watching Omar
Sharif in a fur hat, Dr.
Zhivago, riding a horse-drawn

carriage with Lara, how lovely
Lara, that woman’s face in love
that woman, not my mother

Currently, Georgia San Li is writing poetry and at work on a novel, Untitled: a Portrait from the Tarmac. Her poetry appears, or will soon appear, in Confluence (UK), Dawntreader, LIT Magazine, The Missouri Review and elsewhere. Her poetry was selected for the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize shortlist, and recent work was cited by Hedgehog Press (UK) for commendation. She is the author of the poetry chapbook ‘Wandering’, a Minerva Rising finalist (FLP 2024)

Georgia wrote the following poem about her poem:

Note on Early Definition, circa 1977

This poem is a work of memory, 
from its own remnant rack of desire 
and love and yearning to come alive again. It began 
from a retrospective 
on the question of origin, of revelations
from metaphor, its DNA.  It laments 
what it cannot forget — 
a love, it realizes, 
might have never existed.  
It was strange to find snow 
on return to the desert sun,  
carrying images of a woman's face 
from circa 1977. 
The time frame, unreliable.