Yoon Ha Lee

You do not have to carry your story alone,
However you write it, or others read it.
There is the wind your sister, whose paths are never paths.
There is the sun your lamp, and its attendants the clouds,
Tracing that forever arc in its yellow youth.
There are the stars your jewels, and their stitchery
Of past light and mingled aeons.
These too are your stories, swept by the galaxy's wheeling mass.
These too will carry the fingerprint whorls of your words.

You do not have to carry your story alone.
I am here, thinking of how your story will intersect mine
In the weave of days, the sieve of years.
There are so many ways of marking time, the notches, the scratched moments.
There are so many ways of mapping your way through the world.
Your shadow flies through the continuum upon time's arrow.
There is gravity your anchor, and the weight of narrative.
There are beginnings and ends, the egg unvoiding.
There is the microwave whisper. Listen. It knows your name.

Yoon Ha Lee's fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Lenox Avenue; her poetry has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and Star*Line. She is a section editor at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. She lives in Washington state with her family.