03-10-2025
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
NEON RAIN, PHOSPHORESCENCE (TEARS)
what are we doing to each other
in the surplus fog
a mutual touch becomes
a myriad condition
in which all feelings sleep
open the windows
in the room where I lay
protesting the notion
that coherent sources of light are
always images of one original source
let me interrogate arctic bees about
the stark quadrants they tumble over
how they convert glacial suffering
into sunburned drinkable dew--
such apparent brightnesses
this is a complex and profound
physiological capability
that has no counterpart
the shadowed areas take
on an elevated brightness
shapes and textures come to life
in the dark soil of a humming body
what could we experience
of the luminous world
forsaking ourselves
to permanent noon
DAYLIGHT, NO GRIEF
HAIL, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!
--Paradise Lost
Of firsts and beginnings, light knows the most. In its primary, faint motion of micro-tremor then radiant turn, swelling with uplift and slight ecstasy, it is light that knows all true names.
To seek out origins and their progressive trajectories, we have taught ourselves to investigate the phenomenal rays of long duration from star swarms and curling celestial storms, translating the myriad intensities of their transmission into timelines, elemental compositions, interior tectonics and churn. We peer into the sun’s blinding recesses and can reasonably conjecture at a massive discharge’s origins down to the finest shred of its first instant. We attune ourselves to light’s potencies and emerge otherwise. With insight. We know.
I began my inquiry into light, simply: can I decipher a similar capacity to translate and speak the light with my living human body?
And by doing so, can I relinquish the intensities of an inherited orphan grief?
To speak with light is to encounter the trace of the originating mother body through its lost child. An orphan being, the light reaching us is jettisoned without turning its head back home. A constant flight…of some varieties in duration or decay, but ever onwards and with consistency in its appeal. The steadfastness of its message across vast spans remains nearly uncorrupted, and we look back through its narration into a body that is no longer there.
Oh tell us where you came from. Tell us of that body, its home.
My intuition told me that by confronting this originating, orphan phenomenon fully--by admitting its potencies, its possibilities, to transmit into and transform me--those aspects in me that were steeped in abandonment could be relinquished and freed. As an evaporation, a total admission into the sky’s aerial, benign intelligence.
I want to inhabit that day.
THE AERIAL NATURE OF CELESTIAL BLUE
what comes to life
with the smallest cloud
in solidified blue
suffers an enormous loss
such is life for
the blue sky in a wildflower
or blue eyes at dusk
that distant blue infinity
rises sternly in the soul
vibrates in no sonorous crystal
tonalizes only in the
swift muscular engine
we call clarity, not day
concourse of correspondences
limned with blue hands
active in its dynamics
of dematerialization
dream after the finesse of ancient galleries
whose calm hallways in infinite attention
remain, counseling
a possessed good
such a minimum of substance
in which the bell rings
of its own accord
-from Aerial Concave Without Cloud selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick--celebrated with the author's permission
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up 3 miles from the CIA and currently lives in Denver, CO. She is the author of Aerial Concave Without Cloud, and That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, Solar Maximum, and No Comet, That Serpent In the Sky Means Noise. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she also makes video and installation art. Find her silentbroadcast.com.