Karen An-hwei Lee

 Karen An-hwei Lee

Dear Millenium, on a Rift Zone

On this day of bleeding in a heat wave, I do whatever I wish.
              Bake a raspberry cream cake, drupelets of fruit and sugar                      
                            up to the sky. Doze on a sleigh-bed of cherry wood

                             while listening to an earthquake advisory. The radio,
              a transistor I salvaged from an estate sale, warns
of little swarms of earthquakes in our seismic zone.

Miles east inland, over the Salton Sea of high salinity              
              and dying fish, radio waves murmur of weather —                         
                            Our latest heat wave triggered riots

                            in a state prison. If I lived
              near the Salton Sea, in a zone of nowhere, I’d survive
by swimming in the heat of the moment—

put clods of wax under glass candlesticks,
              seal windows with hurricane caulk, call my loved ones                           
                            although I spoke with them yesterday. Cope

                             with nausea by using a roll-on of wintergreen,  
              rosemary, lemon, and cilantro oil. Do whatever salt
asks you to do—hydrate with aloe, for instance. 

If we dismantled the industrial prison complex,          
              who’d anticipate the inmates, reintegrated
                            into a desert xeriscape by the Salton Sea,

                            would change into fiery angels, one by one?               
              In the best of all worlds, would we expect the prisons
to collapse? In this life, this is what is to come—
this rift in the ground, a seismic zone of activity
              folds like the underworld shifting crosswise
                            when instructed by God to pay attention.