DJ Lee

DJ Lee is a writer, scholar, editor, artist, and regents professor of English at Washington State University. She has published over a hundred essays, articles, and prose poems, the memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State 2020), and eight scholarly books, including The Land Speaks (Oxford 2017). She is at work on a collection of lyric essays called The Edge Is What We Have: Awe and Wonder in a Dimming World, forthcoming from Oregon State. She is also a scholar-fellow of the Black Earth Institute. A hand papermaker and photographer, Lee often combines image and text. Artist residencies include the Arctic Circle Artist Residency, Women’s Studio Workshop, and the Wilderness Art Collective. Find her at debbiejlee.com

Idaho Lake Fragments

1.Swallow’s nest wedged in the hawthorn, woven with pine needles—lodgepole, white, ponderosa—and thickened earth. You are not a cradle or a bedroom but like a bedroom cradle you shelter, rock. Bring me the protection of clay.2.Eagle, wings ruffling the rain drenched air. Bald head a splash of light above Spring Lake. You are not a mood, but like a mood you darken and brighten and fade. There, then gone. There. Gone over the tree-lined hills. Acquaint me with transience.3.Snag. Are those ponderosa limbs twisting from your torso? The deep green has moved into the crevices of your puzzled bark. Your gray head snapped and rutted. You are not an aging woman but like some ancient grandmother you are striking, stricken, snagged. Standing, still. Offer your branched wisdom.4.Campfire: cracked red mudrocks cradle your imperfect head. Charred logs crisscross old coals. Flames gone days, or maybe weeks. You are not her body, but like my mother whose limbs I held as she crossed over, your flame still is in its vanishing. Kindle me.5.Cattails—carnival corndogs, fairgoers crowding the shoreline. Swamped family, springtime pelts warming your oblong heads as you age into summer. You are not wands or wizards but like a wizard wand you can bend perception—be gentle with your whispering change.

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