v i o l a    l e e

conversation of the wood

conversation of her war

conversation of the wood

Branch over branch over branch, this is
how it looked: clusters of wood, stone
over stick, and branch over branch.
There was also straw on gray rock; and
the rock turned the color of cobalt.
Today we are inhaling the avalanche of
blue water; breathing all of this in: the
salt in the air, again and again, the
water is like an avalanche, the wild
sounds of hands on hands. You are the
source. Let us all walk in single file now
to what we are all becoming. Branch
over branch, this is how it looked. The
wild was like hair and tobacco. If I were
to talk of a history and the sounds of you,
then I would create a space with a
bamboo chime waving and making a
flat sound not like metal on metal but
more like earth pounding on straw. Oh
yes, this piece, this installation, and
underneath this chime would be a pile of
tobacco. Do you remember walking
through those fields? Do you remember
what comes next? Those fields
unknowing and all around grew those
strange textures. And far off, who would
have thought that you wanted to go as
far from those fields and your wanting
lead you here to this small city with only
your voice that never mentioned one
branch, never those fields, never ever,
the wood, the field of bamboo, never,
that tobacco, never a history.

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conversation of her war

My husband blends and then pounds salt and pepper into a little stone container. I hear the little grains, and the textures become smooth. No one inherited this damn floor. The light above me as I work makes a humming sound and I think about all her cold phrases, and the weight of them when they are isolated. Today even the phone becomes just another moment and I think about the ring tone and even about the tiny syllables in a day, even the images that meet them when they are uttered. O, the words, the weight of you. O, the words, the descriptions of character and speaker in a moment frozen like a swarm of bees, nearing. For some reason, I think of my father coming home from work and how he never walked home even though work was so close to the air and the couch. O, these words, O, even the speaker, this speaker, and the distancing of voice from the moment, this vein has just been compared with a night of snow. My husband pounds salt and pepper and I think about the smoke in the air that only she experienced. I remember how my mother once told me that her mother took her hand and said, we must walk. O, all these images and cold phrases: morning, death, the smoke in the kitchen and somewhere a car equals hundreds, bodies. In the grand scheme of things, I know that everyone longs for wilderness that is what my husband will never utter. My husband says something in the background and I think of her, and that endless walking she talked about, the strange doors, the men in uniform, there, that was no place to live, such a long distance between those two spaces, such a long distance when there is no light in the hallway, when there is too much walking in the night. Resolve this immediately, please.

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VIOLA LEE graduated from New York University with a MFA in Creative Writing. She has worked as a teacher in many different settings: to undergraduates at NYU, to adults attending community college, to public high school students in the Chicago Public School System, and to children in a children’s cancer unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. In addition to teaching, she is currently working as a Program Specialist for a not for profit jobs training program for youth in the city of Chicago. It is called After School Matters. She is also working on a manuscript of poems. Viola has published poems in small literary journals and has poems forthcoming in Pebble Lake Review, cake train and 580 split. She lives in the city with her husband.