Sueyeun Juliette Lee

 

 

Withheld

 

What the body discloses, a heartfelt murmur pushing softly against a door.

To relinquish all long vowel sounds. Give in to the sincerest stammer’s disorder.

When you reached out, the day’s disguise fell to the ground, quieted,

as if luminescence could ever combine or truly collect.

The heart rolled up its sleeves to let in lament,

that alone should finally see, seethe against its vague gossamer lines.

Sprinkling in the outside allowed for inner disorder.

Satisfied to have been, brightest light within a conch’s shell

curled into a collapse.

If the way foundered on its head, the world in heady response

with the turning of snowflake, a pile of blond rushes for the bower bird—

any making of thing, beast, and weather to relent.

 

 

Perception

 

The way a dragonfly emerges, hypnotic out of air.

To rotate quickly before it. I display myself by default.

Many sides are seen, are illustrated in its eyes.

 

Announced before a solitary crowd.

The outside space moves slowly. It is quite sure.

Also being a condition. Of seeing and then one day not.

 

 

Tell Us Apart

 

The throat concurs by hem-hawing. A swarm alights on potted ferns to signal they agree.

My sister’s face is opal, mine is made of shale.

The afternoon does not stop between us, reflecting what we do.

It gets dark abruptly, thumbing through an index of names.

 

Where we shake apart still stands firm.

I think in two ways, not different.

Resistance can be subtle and vicious. This is my space,

not a name. Give love a chance,

we beg. The poses we take spell I Heart You.

 

 

desire

 

even motion must have a context. a quarry is a place the rocks once held. stripped apart, mined and plumbed into recesses and gaping faces.

 

a transfer, the mending of spaces conferred and closed. the eye closes and with it something in the expanse of horizon, weather, width is displaced, marginally set to the side.

 

the appetite grows and in it we diminish. definition excluding the two as composite, i being what was consumed, not desiring of it. moved and unsettled by small chewing, appropriate liftings and holdings.

 

catching the delinquent in its static flight. if bees left tracings etched in the air. if mornings melted into wax. if all our partings transferred new openings into real time or space.

 

the drift left behind us catching onto what could alternate into now. the movement towards a quieter sweep, taken and caught to release us by the frame. in hesitating don’t we displace, breaching continuities that stagger forth as our extensions. i am not speaking of shadows or light. what breaks forth in waves foresees its consequence, perhaps. structurally, the sea wall can’t defeat the conch.

 

contextually there is a residue. the what i am of the moment turned into fragrance, textured into atmosphere we drift through. words can weigh hardly a millionth of a gram, alert the senses in a wakened bud. takings, leavings, we move apart and against each other’s shores. the who you had been awakening into the what we move towards all the time—resident, residual, real.