Eunice Lee

Aubade

Love you like a progress bar running backwards on a screen, like the 4 minutes remaining
that turn into 4 hours while you look away. Hours, rewinding, unfrying your eggs.
Days and weeks putting your hairspray back in the can. Months and years
thickening your computers, decades blurring your videos as if
kissing them (then taking their colors off). Centuries singing
their jets and fleets back to sleep, empires receding behind
kingdoms receding behind villages receding
behind a forest where you and I might
discover the first hummingbird then
decide to let it go, and watch it
fly backwards into
the sunset.

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Eunice Lee is a poet and translator whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Columbia Journal, The Shoutflower, Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture and elsewhere. She is pursuing a PhD in English at Harvard University and graduated from Princeton University where she won the 2018 Academy of American Poets College Prize.