Lee, Joanna S

Joanna Suzanne Lee

your heart

has grown old.

worn down by the lonelinesses
of a hundred empty homes,
sunken in
like fingers
fallen too long asleep
in a hot bath.

how else
do you show me
the moon,
its silky-
ink silhouette
stained on our back door,
and not kiss me?

there is no monitor
that measures
love. tell me: when
was the last time
it leapt?
got a running start
and just

jumped? heedless
of chasm, of canyon,
of distance?
of the finish,
the fear, the flatline?
your pulse
plays its thud-thump

through limp veins,
forgetting
how to thunder.
if i could see you
the way the lightning
sees, from inside the storm,
i would find it

damp and dark,
with slow rivers
and huddled walls,
a crumpled fist
written with little scars
but untouched, too,
by moonlight.

what i mean when we talk about the weather

writing the same verses i was before
i met you, when, raining, i was then too
pre-sprung and ungainly and insecure
in the plastic smiles and broken-lined blues
of that looseleaf notebook torn up and burned
with the hard yellow of my skirt; alas,
you say, and i like the sound of the word,
how it spells wings in other tongues, forecasts
flight, but we go best down in translation,
loft our respective sadnesses aloud,
can't remember southern constellations,
verb conjugations, lost patterns of cloud
or what it was to love easy, aware
that it must be snowing hard, still, somewhere.

two good wanderers ☊

our tongues travel
cross continents
in dreams as if

they were camel-borne
on some silk road, as if
their shadows

were tied in tangos, as if
the sum of our kisses could
account for something.

your words are rain-
drops that coalesce
into the sadness

of my plateglass thought-
stream. they make for good
poem weather, wet &

expectant & yet
a color is too weighty a thing
to give singly and before a storm.

still, it is better to build bridges
from the edges of oceans:
i would give you the blue

in my eyes, except
on the days they are green.
there are many true worlds,

poet, and the night
touches them
--all.

meditations on the passing of summer

fog curling
off the water makes me feel

like falling
off the world; some-

times it's damn hard
to feel at home here,

the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,

in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive

as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where

the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman

and tossed in God's wastepaper
basket. we dream

of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn's

bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday

mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair

in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.

She

is grass-and-azure empty, her horizon cut-
off right below where heart should be.
there are daisies
in her navel, over

her palms, thighs; she
is open-handed. clouds
shroud her blue-skied breasts,
her blue-hued head. she

stands planted, blouse-
less, face
down. if i could fill
the yellow eyes

of her knees & thumbs & finger-
tips with skin made
of green-growing words, i
would say:

see
the heavens
in yourself and look
up.

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it is a long way since 17, but

by midsummer i
am all riversand and
freckles, inkdreaming

in a language re-
born from murk
and rivermud.

and though
it is good growing
weather, all

sticky rain
and cloudless
noons, my vinedark

currents are slow to crawl,
slow as the sun eats
shadow.

snugged close
on a narrow doorstep,
swatting mosquitoes

seems suddenly
like some kind of love.
so we soak up each

heavy july evening
as if we knew
we weren't meant

to last. as if fall
were already falling.
as if this were

another country
song dripping
to its end.

Night Stains

night stains the whiteness of my skin
with creosote-dipped fingers.
my words are your words, mangled.
the dark breathes loud around us,
citysounds and riversounds
dripping mulled lullabies
into the empty rock glasses
on the bedside table. we lie
leg over leg, star-crossed
in blind streetlight, bluelit and fearbruised
and damp. the cat
is downstairs, un-asleep.
around four a.m. he will be
circling the pillow as i am,
wondering where you dream.
by then you will have turned
over, damp still and flung wide
like a crucifixion;
i will not know you rise.

map to nowhere

today i received a postcard
from puebla,

mexico; the stamp, though,
from hawaii. on the front

a full-color interior
of the oldest library

in the Americas;
on the back, between

RICHMOND, VA and
ALOHA, the silhouette

of a man & a woman,
dancing. you, meanwhile,

are contemplating strides
East, and i am thinking

it has been too long since i
tangoed, though

i shuffle my feet
rather a lot.

ours is a strange
geography, piles

of poems pointing
across nebulae & violin-

necks & back home
again, where

the house
smells of paper & lilac and

the moon
wanes reluctantly.

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