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  • On a Recitation of Psalms
  • Karen An-hwei Lee (bio)

        Or a prayer of sanctification for the dyingpressed tenderly against a stucco wall only a proverbial    stone’s throw away—a leaf ripped out of my journal,aphorisms on red poppies and goat’s bells and hooves,fanned rhythm of bougainvillea streets where I venture    southwest to the other side of a peninsula,a house of dreams set on turrets of rock crevassed, gougedby weather, a hazardous chaos tossed without emotion,without portholes to a sight-line across the neap tide—waves of orchards exhaling lime-blossom perfume nightly.Across the world, brides open their gowns or lie down    as women mix henna dust with lemon,apply this on bridal skin—never fear, say the women,this won’t hurt, in four languages. None of the bridesfear, though the skin beads with moisture—tea-tree oil    or jojoba—only a little nervous.So in the midst of giving in marriage and feasting, buryingand praying for the dead, we listen to news once againof going to war. A tiny nation, one where most of us    never set foot, yet all eyes in the worldwitness children who died of chemical attacks—and bodieslying without sheets over their faces, of the torn women.I could say it would be immoral to start another conflict.I could say this would not cause another civil war.War is never civil.I could say this will not be a velvet or quiet revolution.I could say it is time for us to stop.I could say no to this etude of sunlight haphazardly    spearing the ink        on this wall of a one-way alleytwo soul-widths wide, total strangers passing throughby means of a floating bridge, yoked pontoons in the darknessof shut windows and grillwork—instead, I say a prayer—not for the dead,            the soon-to-die. [End Page 119]

Karen An-hwei Lee

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. A book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora (Cambria, 2013), appears in the Cambria World Sinophone Series edited by Victor H. Mair, Chair of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. Recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Lee currently serves as Full Professor of English and Chair at a liberal arts college in greater Los Angeles. She holds an M.F.A. from the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

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