Bonsung-a :: Impatient Balsam
BY AE HEE LEE
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Monsoon in Busan, garden balsams
plump with rain. My cousin and I gather them greedily,
and we arrive to her house, our arms fragrant and shining.
She crushes the flowers, whole with silky stem, and we take
turns wrapping the paste around the curve of our childish fingers.
The weight of moist petals presses against our virgin nailbeds,
stains the plates into a glistening orange-red. I look for meaning
in everything, and here: the belief in true love
if the color lasts until first snow.
Lake Michigan at the coda of a polar vortex. At the edge,
I can’t distinguish snow from foam, but I’m sure the ice would
taste sweet with its coral glow. My cuticles flake under the gloves—
my nails thirst. I think of all the promises that have yet
to be made. I remain a stranger to many myths, but not this.
Madrugada :: Small Hours
BY AE HEE LEE
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
6:03 a.m. and dusty sunlight percolates through air, canopy of oak, window and yellow curtain, into
my livingroom. It must have been a day like this:
The birth of a word.
The word an offering,
hatching within a fertile mind.
The instance a small god
many have beheld at least once:
A large jellyfish with the body of an unraveling clementine, passing through—
The house billows. Luminous cells ripple across the walls, and even the grey couch gleams, flecks of
morning made crescent with the shadow of leaf.
Inheritance
BY AE HEE LEE
Previously appeared in Frontier Poetry.
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Because there’s pleasure
in secrecy, I kneel in silence before
a kitchen cabinet. I pull out
the large can of sesame oil
inhabiting this corner of the house.
I open the cap, bring my nose closer
to the musk opening. The rim glistens
copper, the smell of an unfamiliar soil,
a country I was born to but did not
grow up with. I breathe it in. I breathe out:
Gosohada— this is still a word
I cannot translate until it evaporates.
*
At times, my mother tells me about
my father, sets afloat hushed fairytales
into the waters of my nights. She explains
my father is a lidded well: a closed circle
of arms, thumbs leaning on each other.
How as the eighth son, no one expected him
to survive the winter. How he lives holding
a birth date that migrates with the moon.
*
Can you love what you don’t know?
I glance at the edge of a mirror,
a crystal caught in my cornea. Maybe
the unknown is but a hard mirage
of what’s known, a dubious carbon copy
of the seer’s mind. My curiosity draws me
to this displaced image, selects from it;
my parents’ nostalgia expands it, infinitely,
like a prism. I want to learn, love
what I don’t know, continue to yearn.
*
A homeland of mountains
with low, uneven shoulders.
In the distance their outlines
are plumed as if made from torn paper.
A homeland of electric forests,
persimmons, and expired peppermint
candies in the shape of diamonds.
This land was never promised to me.
But my memory has palms
that face up to invoke, not own.
*
You have your father’s face,
an aunt told me once. A camel’s long eyelashes
and dark stars for eyes. I admit my father has
passed onto me many of his idiosyncrasies:
the closing of hands behind the back,
the bottling of desire until it bursts
into a thousand iridescent needles of glass.
But when I visit his old house in Chungju,
I don’t call it home. I choose
to glimpse a pair of cosmos flowers resting
their heads against half-finished steps,
caress their purple ears and ask
if they’ll remember me from time to time.
I return to myself— broken and full.
Prayer
BY AE HEE LEE
2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Where does an echo start
when the mouth is also eco?
To praise how
the tongue warms the body,
how it is infinite
in its brokenness,
I sought for cordilleras,
found moths and bone
mountains, language
wandering like a gwishin:
ghost of thick eyelashes
dripping with bitter honey.
Lord, let her pull me
daily into emerald
lagunas. Let my voice be
lacunae unhushed.
