Leftover

Yuxi Lin

adj. or n. (1891) : that has or have been left over : not used up or disposed of :surviving from an earlier time

xiao mei, xiao mei, they call youmini-America, little beautystranger woman-girlyour body has more definitionthan when you left at twelve& nobody knows what to do with itthe men talk to you about choicesas in the ones they made for their wivesthe women talk to you about childrenbut not the ones they buried in shamethey insist on being helpfulas in they don’t want you to beone of those, as in wan le, as ingame over, which you used to confusewith its homophone, as infrolicked, as in finished joythey gave you a name & once againyou had no say in the matter, as inabandon, as in you leave hometo find it had left you

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Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American poet. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, Spilled Milk Magazine, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is an MFA candidate at New York University, where she received the Lillian Vernon Fellowship.

The Southern Review

Autumn 2018

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana State University

Co-Editor & Poetry Editor
Jessica Faust

The Southern Review is one of the nation’s premiere literary journals. Hailed by Time as “superior to any other journal in the English language,” we have made literary history since our founding in 1935. We publish a diverse array of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the country’s—and the world’s—most respected contemporary writers.

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