Won Lee
Summer 2023 | Poetry
[Like breath once mine, exhaled]
Like breath once mine, exhaled,
you rode the circuit of me,
left something of you behind,
took something of mine with you -
who did you become after you passed
right through me, and was what I left
as light as the wetness left
on cheeks as one walks through fog?
Analogical is my frailty
that fumbles with what it'd say
if speaking weren't so fraught
with what each sentence closed:
we clipped the wings of thought
and caged it in the definite.
Though I still dream
of language cracked in kiln
through which its content leaks:
we'll patch it up again
while reading in its patchwork
the physics of the thing
our language could not hold.
Won Lee is a Korean-American writer and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. His lifelong interests lie in the study of affect and the double-bind of relationality.
Won recommends Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits, and the film The Celebration.