VERSEWRIGHTS
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives

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
.

Picture

​Go to page 2 of Joanna Suzanne Lee's Poetry

Joanna Suzanne Lee's profile

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.

This night, there are no stars

watching sky darken,
we contemplate
words like leaden,
 
sultry, in-
digo
. but leaden
is closer to
 
the slivered prison
of my rib-cage,
bars behind which
 
this ache pro-
creates. sultry
means barefoot river
 
afternoons and indigo
has always been
grotesque, except
 
on peacocks.
so instead i watch
raindrop veins
 
on plateglass,
think of melting &
the sublimation
 
of misted breath,
remember sweat
on glasses,
 
graveled chaos,
rug-burnt morning
sunlight before
 
the world changed.
but these windows
will not open and we
 
feel guilty for
our guilt, wonder
why the stars
 
stay absent. are
river afternoons so
different, now?
 
we watch and already
rain is slowing; veins
close & strand drops
 
in streetlit glass,
almost like star-
light. almost.


Go to page 2 of Joanna Suzanne Lee's Poetry
Picture

Comments?

***

​Thank you for visiting Tweetspeak VerseWrights.
© 2012-2018. VerseWrights. All rights reserved.:
Acrostic Poems
Ballad Poems
Catalog Poems
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems
Epic Poetry
Fairy Tale Poems
Fishing Poems
Funny Poems
Ghazal Poems
Haiku Poems
John Keats Poems
Love Poems
Math, Science & Technology Poems
Ode Poems
Pantoum Poems
Question Poems
Rondeau Poems
Rose Poems
Sestina Poems
Shakespeare Poems
Ship, Sail & Boat Poems
Sonnet Poems
Tea Poems
Villanelle Poems
William Blake Poems
Work Poems

To translate this page:
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives