— After Arthur Sze
I glanced back. What I thought was a chip on the rim
of my coffee mug was actually a glare of bright light.
A glare of bright light overhead — fluorescent tubes shaded
by milky plastic, molded in repeating pyramids. The shapes
seem to move, from my vantage face up on a gurney, dizzy
from the flight down a corridor to the operating room.
Unidentifiable clinking, electronic beeps, disembodied voices.
Disembodied voices from the kitchen — cinnamon — laughter, warm blue
cove. A lullaby still in my head, still unsung — the aching —
unshed tears ground fine, embedded in my children’s bones,
sand that won’t wash off, that the waves pull hard and deep to the sea floor.
The sea floor, muddy blanket over earth’s mantle, the first to sense
faults; nothing but secrets there, out of light’s reach. My children
might be sleeping, thrashing with fever, conjuring dishes I taught them
in the kitchens of their lives — out of reach — the remains of those
who did not survive Greenwood’s burning a century ago, though today
shovels gash the turf at Oaklawn, searching, leaving scars like the gristled line
across my chest, my sea floor, canopy of my still-beating heart, lifeline
refracted in a million lives — kids bicycling downhill, laughing,
chasing too fast the thrill of wind and a glare of bright light.
Click here to read Margaret Lee on the origin of the poem.
Image by Sean Sinclair on Unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Margaret Lee:
Fluorescent lights, bicycles, a cemetery — odd places to seek answers. Guided by Arthur Sze’s Sight Lines (Copper Canyon 2019) where sericulture, python skin, and green turtle broth comfortably cohabitate, I connect a string of images from recent personal crises (a cancer journey and a string of health crises in my immediate family) and communal wounds (the lingering effects of a brutal Race Massacre one hundred years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live). In “Sightings” I try to align poetic technique with the connections I find in the fundamental unity of matter — the fact that all physical things consist of the same substances. “Sightings” favors imagistic coherence over logical links to depict an environment of change and healing.
Margaret Lee is a poet, scholar, fiber artist, watercolor sketcher, and aspiring naturalist. She finds poems in the Oklahoma prairies, New Mexico deserts, Oregon seashores, and inner landscapes. Margaret was a finalist for the 2023 international poetry prize of The Atlanta Review and her poems have been published in four chapbooks: Someone Else’s Earth (Finishing Line 2021), poems built around surviving fragments of Sappho; Sagebrush Songs (Finishing Line 2022), a meditation on landscapes of northern New Mexico; Oklahoma Summer (Finishing Line 2023), a reflection on recent ecological and demographic challenges in Oklahoma; and Orange Persephone (Finishing Line, forthcoming in 2025), an exploration of a mother’s depths of love and grief. Her poems also appear in From Behind the Mask (Paperback, 2020) and a new anthology upcoming in 2024 whose theme is Echoes of Tradition: Indigenous Orientation to Community, Time, and Land. Margaret’s academic research and publications focus on the ancient Greek language and the history and culture of the ancient world.
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