Prayer for the Lost Water Bees
The ocean is a crazed blue azalea.
Honeybees are intoxicated on blue —
this is why they vanished.
No one knows where the water bees went
in the heat, since bees are drawn to water.
Others say it is an omen. California will slide into the sea
where it first belonged, a shelf underwater.
Angelenos call the phenomenon of swarming water bees
a congregation as in a church — anointed fire.
Water bees vanish.
Or say water bees never existed in the first place. This is why
we do not know where they went. We never knew
their true names or their places of origin. We conjure bees
drawing water in their bellies, glass bulbs of rain
flying over culverts and arroyos in search of hovels
to call home. In the light of firehills,
the sun is not rising but setting — dunes illuminated
by the light of invisible bees —
this is why they vanished.
Lime Ceviche Before the Rapture
Fuchsia twilight of monoxide haze —
Los Angeles on a lip of apocalypse
this winter
while I huddle under a gas-lamp —
sea-garden to tongue,
radiccio with olive oil,
ceviche of salmon, yellow-tail, and ahi-tuna
soaked in chili-lime juice,
tenderhooks
of bliss flayed
without fin or bone.
The burning aerosol hour chides me
for murmuring fiscal cliff austerity —
or whether raw-fish sashimi is ceviche,
Japanese or Peruvian
at the rapture,
whether we shall retain our names.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Duress (Cascade 2022), Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (Slant 2021), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored two novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017) and The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis 2019). Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, is the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres (Singing Bone 2018). Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Currently, she serves in the administration at Wheaton College.
Photo by Roberto Nickson from Pexels