This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from ASTERISM by Ae Hee Lee (Tupelo Press 2024).
Self-Study through Daily Sustenance
(excerpt)
to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days
—Li Young Lee
While in Michigan, I make it a habit to invite friends over for dinner. I enjoy experimenting with the miscellany of ingredients in the fridge. Measurements from this country still con- fuse me. But instead of forcing myself to translate kilos into pounds and vice versa, I choose to trust my hands, their memory of weight. My friends, one from Honduras, another from Guatemala and Korea, say my cooking reminds them of their homes somehow. Our hearts are their own stomachs; they fill with every spoonful we take.
*
For me, a sickly child, my mother prepares a warm bowl of congee, sprinkles it with shredded chicken and sesame seeds. From across the table, she watches me take one careful mouthful of soft rice at a time, barely restraining liquid snot with whatever strength I have left in my nostrils. My mother says she likes watching how each bite makes moons rise out of my eyes.
*
After a round of pulling at each other’s hair for a trivial reason, I approach my sister with a split apple in hand— in Korean, the sound of the word apple, sagwa1, also meaning to ask for forgiveness. We bite into the fruit and reconcile. I’m reminded forgiveness is something you can sink your teeth into, can limn what’s sharp with honey.
1 Maracuyá. Passion
fruit. Perilla.
Kkaennip. Lúcuma.
See
how they wreathe
my tongue,
how their sounds
wet my mouth
with hunger.
Born in South Korea and raised in Peru, Ae Hee Lee is the author of ASTERISM, selected by John Murillo for the 2022 Dorset Prize, and the poetry chapbooks Bedtime || Riverbed, Dear bear, and Connotary, the last of which was selected as the winner for the 2021 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her work can be found at The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, and Southern Review, among others.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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