Letter of Openings and Closings
Aimee Seu | Poetry
Hello stained glass cornea,
Dear this morning’s blurred edges
sun coming over
the hill of her hip. Oh Hello,
Elysium hips!
Dear lovely haunting
of her sable spacious hair.
Dear thing I didn’t know
how to dream.
To the party that clothed us
in enough smoke and noise
To touch. My Dear hot pink
moon pouring square light
in my window the first time
she slept in this room.
Dear swallowed time
before we met,
brazen-shy wanting,
Dear myself kissed –
open,
Dear hibiscus tea, my tongue
turning red, Dear tapioca, angel food
apricot liqueur of her,
To Whom it May
Devour, Dear favorite
muscle, they say
the tongue heals
faster, Dear back seat
sighing into
sobering up, coming to – to her eyes.
Dear front seat on the highway one hand
reached across. Attention her ambidextrous adrenaline—-
O, to cum with the windows down.
To the couch dismantled
in some friend’s lost Atlanta
living room–I want to always be
sleeping in too small a space with you.
Dear soft comforter
pulled over us
like a room made of cloud.
Finally, my body smells
like her t-shirt,
Dear tinted window
and restraint, Dear, when we weren’t speaking, the pressure
in the air was like just before hail.
Dear battlefield of her voice.
Witch burning of her
brow. She smiled a jean jacket sadness
and all the birds
took off at once.
For the attention of everything she witnessed
as a kid from the backseat, the heat-mirage she saw alone. Love,
I feel women kissing through
us who time held
at bay.
Kneeling in the shower, all the birds took off at once,
as if tied by string.
Dear I’ll find you at the concert, at low
tide, and at the airport
in the afterlife. Yours Truly, this danger
moved deliberately into
because someday we’ll die—
X O
(I climb up to her mind’s treehouse
spangled by the shadows of leaves.)
As ever,
our bodies pressed like two branches
of a diverted river
flowing back into one.
P.S. Paradise
will be listening to you read
aloud, on a blanket awash in sunshine (green slope, hot afternoon, where I’m always.)
Sincerely,
in the whisper-licked ear, From
when your name in my mouth first felt
like an ember
in wind.
No one saw this forest fire
coming, Always, again soon,
Your Unalterable
girl drunk on drives
before dawn, our ex-boyfriends
hunting us. Girldrunk on your taste
in secret, wide open fields. Fervently
each one-more-time, until
we’re a drooling mess of quartz
limbs, pretty corpse of each small
death’s levitation. Love
myself enough to give me this. Affectionately,
disappearing into her pupil’s black void.
Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize and the forthcoming chapbook Nepenthe Radiant (Finishing Line Press Summer 2025). She graduated from the University of Virginia Poetry MFA and was recipient of Academy of American Poetry Prizes at UVA and Temple University. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Poets, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Honey Literary, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Leavings, and Minnesota Review. She currently studies at Florida State University’s Creative Writing PhD program. She is a Philadelphia native.