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.