Karen An-hwei Lee
Our helium rebels join the global Occupy movement.
On this planet, at this very minute – a thousand men
and women in exile release balloons filled with poems,
or poems are taped to balloons as they float over us.
As the balloons pop, syllables in nebulae of gas
drift over onlookers who read aloud the words
until they sail out of sight, puffing smoke-rings.
The balloons take poems wherever they go,
dropping at the mercy of hail or lightening.
Some balloons even scan dactylic hexameter.
We imagine balloons rising over barricades
as poems flutter in a foggy Manhattan noon.
Lovely midnight in Paris, a vending machine
sells books for francs. Le livre à toute heure!
Baudelaire, Celan, and Valéry have no inkling
their labors are sold by automated vendors.
I covet a book-machine for my living room
and a portable mini-wax museum or diving bell,
both variations on an iron-cast balloon.
Ars poetica slams through Avocado Heights,
shouting cloud-based voxels around the clock
as manic pixels hum, occupy the world.
When we open our windows, air molecules
wander from a malodorous, fleshy durian
on a floating river market in Bangkok,
not quite making it to this zone
in time
for balloons.
A summer monsoon carries the odor of durian,
turpentine and onions.
Desiring solitude on a beach at Racha Noi in Phuket,
a woman writes the word, soledad, while reading
to fishermen in the Andaman Sea.
The word is globo
for balloon.
My name
in the light is
Soledad.