You are reading an archived issue of Sleet Magazine. To return to the current issue, click here.
Volume 2 Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2010-2011
Wherever You Reconnoiter
Repeat After Me
It isn't fate's by-now rusty blade,
or thoughts re-thought until parasites
slinging dice. But the way
we fork our peas of death
before a static-enshrouded anchorman.
What else to result from a protest
art show in the living room of a mummy
in green silk and egret bolo? I am here
to learn something I've been preparing to run
from my whole life. Some tally
I've regarded as someone else's broken mirror.
And here you are renegade nurse
to all the galaxy's cadavers, eyes
asizzle, breathing
anisette into my brine. Friend,
Lover, Daemon in the sense of terrible
inspiration. Here on the Lower East Side,
once the most densely populated
tract on the planet, now tight
slacks, eyelashes blessed, the last Gypsy
fortune teller an upscale burrito shack.
Cooling on Suffolk in a flat groaning
with submarine pipes, flitting
in and out of day one hundred-four of the war marinating on TV—
I intuit: More
as molten you in brassiere
ponytail your hair and predict three
generations 'minimum' to heal the psychic wounds.
Here where you impersonate a fire
to transmelodica as the year turns blue.
How will I ever stop you? Why
would I want to?
In the next room, I half-hear them
conversing in their mother tongue
as I'm sure they did when I was in her womb
His gnarled fingers, I imagine, now
coursing his white, luminescent hair,
rapid-motion; hawing of the bastard
broken air conditioner
So, my history, that mountainous land
they intone, muffling to salty fog
even as I try to visit Seoul
every few summers—closed faces,
double takes: Is he slow, maybe a speech
impediment….
But what of the soul?
Its muscled thrum
over years like a whale
settling finally to sea floor
to conserve heat
in its aorta's core?
Now she is soothing
her better half's bitter woes
over his forced retirement
with smooth, drum-skin
glottals
I know well this evocation;
the firm yet reassuring soft
guttural cooing I began to unlearn
the first morning she nudged me
into school—
Useless on my own
lover, and, now
only partially resurrected
in my heave
of the final box,
stuttering footsteps,
unsure
where to rest
my vocal cords
Ed Bok Lee is interviewed in this edition of Sleet.