Karen An-Hwei Lee
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Mizu in Seven Languages
Shui. Eau. Agua.
das Wasser.
Acqua. Mool. Mizu.
Or a financial love-offering for radios –
An angel tunes into the station.
Megahertz,
she murmurs. Love is on the air,
not in or of it.
Is this a chapel?
No. A radio station. Flown from Romania,
a woman and her mother
write a gift for seventy dollars.
The mother, nearly
ninety and sightless,
wishes to send via post.
No, says her daughter.
Mother,
we do not mail.
Drop in this box.
On the air, listening, the angel
takes the offering to heaven –
Daughter asks, is there a fountain?
Under the staircase
whispers the angel.
The women, unhearing or not listening,
circle the station
three times. At the fountain is
a sign – water in seven languages.
Ah, says the mother.
O singura limba nu ajunge niciodata.
One language is never enough
in this millennium.
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Karen An-Hwei Lee currently lives in San Diego, where she serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University. She is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her first novel, Sonata in K, was published in 2017. A book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Lee’s work appears in journals such as The American Poet, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Journal of Feminist Studies & Religion, Iowa Review, and IMAGE: Art, Faith, & Mystery, and she was recognized by the Prairie Schooner / Glenna Luschei Award. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Lee previously lived in greater Los Angeles, where she taught herself how to play a cherrywood harp. She earned an MFA from the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University and a PhD in British & American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.