Joanna Suzanne Lee - 2

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On the Sesquicentennial of the
​Burning of Richmond

One hundred fifty years ago today,
they set fire as they fled.
I sniff the wind for ashes, imagining
how smoke would have rolled
 
off the hill, how much of what was,
gone. It is another day in this house
with you without you, April second.
Most moments I am not sure what
 
to feel except sick to my stomach,
remembering occasionally the Vergil quote
I chose for my high school yearbook caption:
Amor vincit omnia, love
 
conquers all. There is a chill,
and I think of turning back
on the heat, notice the cat
has puked on my best notebook,
 
wonder what there is of today
that I can toss or burn.
Yesterday, it was a stack of books
& the still-unopened bottle of saké
 
I brought back from Japan
the year my mother died--
if she were here she would say why,
why is everything you write so sad?
 
The day before that, two
faithfully languishing cactus plants;
I felt ugly seeing them in the supercan.
Because, mom, I never learned
 
how to stop being conquered.
The cat settles between me
and the keyboard, his rumbling,
his querulous warmth comfort to us both.
​

Color theory

my head turns to follow
the camaro as it blurs
gleaming in June sunlight;
 
There is no color as candy blue 
you say, & it is just another
round with the heavy bag
 
as we cruise swerving
riverward a hot back road,
windows down, my skin
 
glistening like metal. i smile
and duck is so, i say, & you
bob and grin and i wish
 
every Sunday were like this:
fistless not-at-your-face fights
where you just brush my cheek
 
and we ride, river-
wound and sticky sweet, instead
of sitting like regrets, side-by side
 
plucking apologetic petals
that fade. love
is not pink.
​

Evanescence

some things are too easily forgot-
(ten), like the wire
to the champagne cork, twisted
to separate
the front door key
from the back. 
 
i miss your two oclock river-
heart, the train-
slowing beat of us
in deep afternoon light,
how i used to run
back to that spot 
by the bridge and find you
waiting.
 
there are places where
air has more space
to breathe, the skies 
heavy wrung out 
washrags damp
with dirty sunshine.
 
in air like that train warnings
hang lonely, remembering
things like champagne, 
its bubbles the very metaphor
for hope. 
 
i wish
we could have kept each
other from falling. i want
that song caught between
whistles, about running
till your sides stitch up, 
about two riverbank lovers
still on the edge 
of something.

beneath a pillowed, dripping sky

i have never walked through cotton fields
in fall, picking the cloud from their prickled
finger-y heads.
 
i think it must be like what the poet meant
when he said i can write the saddest lines
tonight, the un-
 
doing of dream from stalk,
the end of a season. i imagine your calves
naked in the whiteness,
 
the scratch of stem on stem. i imagine
your hands, a pale cloud-reaching,
empty and empty.

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the desert cucumber

in the span of eighty years, the saguaro cactus, 
sensing imbalance, can begin to grow a single 
arm. while seas sink, their floors creeping up, 
the air grows dry as if from a bathroom door 
left open after a century-long shower. what will 
last? i have grown arms in much less space.
i insist too much on grand declarations. 
the blue blue of sky cleanses even the mold
of canyons. spiny and full of thorns, love 
is a thing of myth, like a desert cucumber.
who are you when you stand straight and arm-
less?
​

love by the river in springtime is a
​perilous thing

the sky is bruised
with purpled patches,
gauze of white cotton
cloud strewn unsteadily
across the southern horizon.
 
many have come
with their beach chairs
and their expensive long lenses
to watch the herons
chase each other round
 
the naked winter nests
in the farthest branches.
i watch them watching
from the pipe bridge over
pregnant waters, the little islands
 
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing,
tree roots emerging from the current like
strange seabirds that reach
for the sky. from the squawk
on the other side of the river,
 
i know the herons aren't
in the trees. they've found higher
ground among the shallows and
play their love games, as we do,
amid the rocks and the shadow.

other consequences of a high water table

raindrops cling
to low-slung graves, each
soul dead
without a fear of drowning.
 
lichen covers tree limbs
and lichyard; time is slowed
to the speed of waves.
This is a no-wake zone,
 
i joke as we drive
through standing water, 
the big houses on stilts
but the funeral home
 
flush with the marshes.
i wonder if when they turn
on their flatscreens
with remote flicks
 
from sofas sagged
down by the stains
of so many salt-damp
years, they listen
 
to the news of ISIS and middle-
eastern wars and missing
college students
and feel like they're
 
from a different world, or
if they think of dark waters, 
and that there are 
worse ways to die. 

It was never quite like this,

the shallow wading pool of past, its pink
mermaid-clad collapsible sides filled
with dead grapevine Mom wrestled
from the cage-wire fence & sunk
in its bathwater depths to be made more
pliant for the working. Once I buried
a burn there, dip’t surreptitiously
from a showoff jump on Old Miss Judy’s
just-rid bike, my shiny white shin in stark
relief to the gap-black teeth of her red-
haired grandson. I remember, too, the stains
of walnuts that fell like dull tennis balls
all around the pool’s pressed grass;
a quarter a bucket all Indian summer long
while Mom cut & shaped & dried
under the shade of the bitter leaves.
I keep one of those wreaths cornered
in the utility closet under winter coats,
still, dusting its thick ribbon & fluffing
up the bow after every first frost has passed.
​

in this poem, there are no herons.

there are seagulls. their awkward crying fills my dreams, pre-
pubescent squawks for pity or breadcrumbs which
leave me lying damp in the cold cotton windingsheet that
​couldn't
hold you. go back to sleep, you said, untying the
darkness with the corners of your eyes, me
standing naked and musting on the cigarette-
scorched floor. so i
did. pulled up my second-best lace panties, the shades
down on another lost Saturday night. regret fills your space to my
left :
that your toes no longer touch mine. that the sun still came up.

​

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