Three Poems by June Daowen Lei
By June Daowen Lei
Emergent Instrument
Obviously, the word is state. As in
of emergency
yet a body continues to rattle
onto the train and into the desk chair
and so on. So on
panic rises in language, within words
large as deluge, surge, or incurable
hypochondria.
I dream I am a little subway rat
with full immunity, patch tail spending
all my days running
up the live rail. Endive-shaped heart-pink nose.
Pile of bile. Iotas of loose light float
through the iron grates
so they can see our shining, lucid state:
rats on the track staring at the people
on the platform who
stare back. Someone tries to speak, but they are
not the instrument. It is the rat who
states, you are
vermin,
hosting viruses and evolving them.
In dream I make appointments that never
happen: the lost time
makes up lost places, palatial estates
the tipping point where language goes molten
its liquid state sears
the first layer off. When I live there,
I see everything in micro: small fissures
threatening the whole
state of being. I smell it too, moving,
decomposing and so on. It smells like
the future, ripe and fragrant.
Yes Here I Am
Listening to the english sparrow sing the
jaunt tune of the ice cream truck passing
through this summer like a phantom of past
summers, and yes, I know now that I spent
months ignoring the song of a bird
yearning for its pastoral heartland; its
alkaline loneliness answering an
unintended call by impulse, torrent
of longing that lasts for the house sparrow:
brought to america via Brooklyn, 1851 who
yes, sought the comfort of a cupped hand
only to land as an uneasy pest
after an undesired voyage to
an unfamiliar country. Fervor of
displacement familiar to
my mother, who too lived in that nest
of Brooklyn, in the house with bats in the
attic and a bathtub in the kitchen, who went
without resentment, not knowing the
colonized went on to colonize
to rove & raid and they made children so now,
here we are with violence fossilizing our
bones into sedimentary rock: anaerobic, rich
with carbon, finite.
National Geographic
Sitting by the mill
on an idle river
spinning textiles
spilling water
the lush reds of an
afgani dress in panic:
darning a cold white
sheet in the summer.
Oh my unchanged body
with open mouth choked
on the saffron air in the
soft light
I hold my face up to the
edge, drink the copper
water turning green. I am
feeling like the sun,
now collapsing time,
rust of the gold night
descending. I can
not see now
beyond the embankment.
I cannot breathe through
the lurid distance
between the place
and the photograph. The
fabric held tight against
the weaving hand, patina
of silence
It was so bright in color you
could have been there.
Stood by them. You could
have been them.
About the author:
June Daowen Lei is an art worker, a poet, and a lifelong New Yorker.
