青 / QING GHAZITSU
by NICOLE W. LEE
Nervose winter. Above nodes of town houses, eucalypts send dendritic fingers into 青,
then synapse into sky, distance’s true 青.
Midlife, with knots along the seam. The promise, still, of unhemmed happiness,
while each day the creases stiffening: ambitions unborn, missed collisions. Unlike who? 青
When met with regret, emptiness can reveal gaps in its own thinking: its tendency, when repeated, to thicken into feeling.
As in this afternoon of absence sagged on the couch. Its nagging to fill inner rooms: a déjà vu 情.
If a body full of holes can no longer hold loss,
does its scaffolding forget what to do, 擎?
To remain in one state is to become orificed by moth. Scrap of a poem, miscarried. Half-eaten orange, azure-maned with mold.
My fruits flea-bitten, I finger the half-life of Sylvia’s silk screen, fossilized with petroleum-blue 蜻.
Shadow of a plane chafing the memory of a cabin’s cottoned oxygen. All those years, empty, in the air.
I entered no temples. Ignored joy flocked across ponds for its spotted residue: 鲭.
Suburb’s dusky utterances. Traffic, chromatic in key. Monotony scraping against bare strands of thought.
Chord of a dog’s duplicated bark. And a longed-for voice, limpid, into scar tissue, 倾.
Suffering is porous, even when viewed through translucencies. Of a land’s inhabitants, it scatters.
Rapture narrowed to the thickness of a phone screen, figures fleeing drones proliferate into 晴.
Who was it that spoke of a life without attachments as lightness? Oddly, not a poet.
Still, I refuse to thin my sentences to threads. Slew 轻.
Balcony’s liminality, before the congestion of morning. Laundry, on the deck chair, paused.
Unfolding, exquisitely, one’s own corners. Then, from below the center: another exhaling into smoke that twice blew 氰.
Syringed of all feeling, I study the ruptured vein
splitting my forearm. Its broken-through 靘.
Night climbs vines of hopelessness. Thriving, interminably, with the insistence of the deciduous:
intimacy’s thickenings. Roots, the wooly nest of them. This light spiking in from the street—from the bamboo 箐.
Let me stay with this ash of nostalgia.
Some patinas must be left for beauty, the way this copper pot is not due 清.
Yes, I can temper grief rising to a low simmer,
but no, not how it arrives—sock-footed, without thank you, 请.
Dawn. The sky a mirror, like the one the poet 李 Shangyin wrote of centuries ago.
Clouded with longing, he knew he was far from Mount Penglai. Knew what would never ensue: 綮.
化 / HUA GHAZITSU
by NICOLE W. LEE
All around you—September, dressing. The days take off their watery jackets. Rain shower 化
into a stickiness on the skin, then back again. On the hour: its vapor-化.
Even as a child, I understood that abundance can be as changeable as a season. The unrehearsed scriptures of early spring.
That which seems barren can intuit its own potency. As wind muttering a thin mantra, undecided whether to offer 华.
Through drawn up blinds: storm that unshackles wine-colored bark. The herb garden dashed 绿肥红瘦.
Like Li Qingzhao’s maid who overlooked the crab-apples, have I failed to notice some blooms becoming lesser 花?
These days, it’s my grandmother I think of when swallowing bitter tinctures. How to sit despite the lineage of dismissal.
To trust that the soil’s generations are being tilled by blades of inner 铧.
Long walks beneath eucalypts’ erotic bodies, whose skins emit persistent light. And, the quiet pentimento of their stripes.
Strange to have spent half a life pining for distance, only to imprint the familiar. Hovering between long shadows: ghosts of silver 桦.
Eased angles. Language, softened at its borders. The cornered can turn child-like
when provided safe landing. In the playground, I listen to the acute, absorbed by 儿话.
The way a morning’s fraught portrait can occupy a nose:
natives’ soft wash framed by the thick strokes of the invader. An odor 画.
Lurid green scarf of hesitation, which chokes the valley after a week of warmth, as if slashed from atmosphere’s fabric.
And the rough threads of its cousin: doubt. Once more within, pins, barb-sharp. Again, the reminder you can never 划, only ever 划.
Broken: plum blossom branch. Another with no-one to give it to.
I want, this spring, to startle my heart. To pluck a single petal, with proper 婳.
Then the day, fingerprinted by the invisible glittering of spider silk accidentally gathered from the garden hose.
Its ganglion touching the wet nerves of remembrance: that which is delicate can stick when not drowned in water, 划.
Afternoon, unguarded, with the sense of a stranger retreating.
How anticipation can suddenly unstiffen its tail, roll over without furrier 猾—
Along torturous loops of interior labyrinths,
tiny saccules tremble with hunger—哗哗—
—flapping up from a fence, kookaburra laughter—哗—
followed by wing flutter—砉砉—
—look, look how sunset gallops
towards me with vermilion hair, a sire 骅—
—dear 婷婷—dear feeling—that like this tree’s brushes brimming with jacaranda’s paint,
a second flush will come before the season of flower 化—
author pic here
Nicole W. Lee ’s poetry has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Waxwing, among others, and received fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and AWP. Her poem “Deluge: A Chinese Almanac” won the 2024 Palette Poetry Previously Published Prize, while her poem “Here is Where We Meet” was a finalist in the 2025 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize. Born to Chinese Malaysian parents, Nicole is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and associate poetry editor at Four Way Review. For more, visit nicolewlee.com.
Next ( Xu Li) >
< Previous ( Kathy Fagan)