Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Elemental fire in its purest blue hue captures an echo of human hands outstretched towards the end. Flicker flash consumption and a quiver, or breath spurts from what fount. What you touch also ignites, but only in an interior location that resonates to you after endless days. Blue and blue concatenations. The whorls of her ear curl with fragile solemnity underneath my inquisitive tongue. I hold her against me; she is complex and frail—recall traffic patterns spinning slowly from a distance, or the way arctic clouds barely turn. Mute struggle beneath this relentless exploration, an endless submissive exhale. And what does your body do.

⬩

A cool receptive orb, mercury outshines copper in your ancestral light. To leap into it is to crush against a silver veil or discover blonde spiders drinking from the tracks in your fingertips as you lean against the vague windowsill, finally alone in your contemplation. Touch sky and break into the open mouth of the continent. Push hard and slow, with vigor. Again.

⬩

Lead beats fire then gold, but lapis transmits spiritual principles into the basic core density of your unsuspecting bones. What mirror–the antique blue sky forgets remnants. Trail fingers along the coal ash of her spine, how it feathers into disarray and dissolve. Hesitation in the breath summons spoors of shadows, namelessly. Tongue quake, tongs lit at the hilt to steam fragrant with redundant char and spool. Watch the thin bones of his fingers and his flesh bunch with resolve as he “reanimates” mute entry. Desire is the patient crescendo scratch of graphite across the page.

⬩

Dark turning vellum and hair.

Stroke the edge with velvet fragments and bloody bits. Is it solemn. Do you taste clay.

⬩

Not to wedge or shove, nor cram. Not to torch, to light, or even foam.

With frequency—an ocean.

Expressing concavity and ejection. I WANT TO UNDERSTAND. Bliss as swelling, tidal, circumferential, diffidently. Bliss as expectant swarm. Soft cloud no glow.

Density—absent. What vehicle. Disembark the shrinking wave.

⬩

I require you to fill this glass abundantly. A downpour of green molten copper studs into persistent flames = the definition of a certain light. With ecstasy, unlike stellar lace that transmits only cool duration. Slick ambient rover. I concur and pull her soft sands across my chest, practice a patient elasticity. She rolls magnificently before the storm strides through the door and her hair whips me across the eyes. Cavernous pleasures in the curled page, its release.

((heaving foil, wet turns—

⬩

Burn off the waxy upper tip and trace the black vein into a molten core. Strokes small curls into wool then cedar smoke with uplift. No coals. Two parts attic chant decants phosphorescently, quiet creases near the groin to sink into with mallow puffs. Drink deeply to the thickest drop. Oak sap, no. Maple tinged. Perhaps. Amber fury and light—yes. With crescent thorned horns.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee is the author of That Gorgeous Feeling (2008), Underground National (2010), and Solar Maximum (2015), among other books. Her writing focuses on birthright, homeland, and identity. Lee has held fellowships with the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Kunstnarhuset Messen, Hafnarborg, and the UCross Foundation. In 2006, she founded Corollary Press, which publishes chapbooks of multi-ethnic writing. Her work has appeared in the Constant Critic, Jacket2, EOAGH, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver, Colorado where she works for The Gathering Place, Denver’s only daytime drop-in shelter for women, children, and transgender individuals experiencing poverty and homelessness.