Poetry

Jennifer Fossenbell recently relocated from Beijing, China back to Denver, USA. Her poetry and other linguistic experiments have appeared in online and print publications in China, the U.S., and Vietnam, most recently So & So, Black Warrior Review, The Hunger, and where is the river. She completed her creative writing MFA at the University of Minnesota in 2014. Also, there is no “back”.

WEARING MYSELF BACKWARDS

Q: Where did you mainly compose?

A: Wrong question. I mainly decomposed.

Q: Isn’t creation just another platform for devastation?

A: I’m making another one to lose.

1. Did you ever in your life create something original?

A: We are, all of us, children of the one universe.

Q: But the multiverse.

A: Angels and geometry.

Q: What are you so fucking afraid of?

A: Death firstly and second, death of my child, now children.

A: Cancer of the throat or hands. Wrath. Collision.

A: Wondrous visions of pain, which abound.

Q: Because everything and everyone is so fluid.

A: The doing runs over into not doing. The making runs into dying.

Q: Pity the dark that is afraid of itself.

A: I don’t know what it means, but I know it well.

Q: When you approach your bed in the dark, what are you afraid of?

A: Finding myself already lying there.

Q: The body finally gives the body permission.

A: To go out. To fall apart.

Q: There is a sun inside. There is a bright hole.

A: I am a divided state.

Q: All that comes to pass.

A: Too, shall pass.

Q: When you step on the train every day, what are you afraid of?

A: Leaving myself behind.

T. S. Hidalgo (46) holds a BBA (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), an MBA (IE Business School), an MA in Creative Writing (Hotel Kafka), and a Certificate in Management and the Arts (New York University). His work has been published in magazines in the USA, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Barbados, Virgin Islands (USA), Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, China, India, Singapore, and Australia. He also has a career in finance and the stock market. 

I don’t know how long I’ve been in this car cemetery                                                                 

New York is like a cage, isn’t it?

I sing, here, from far away,

to the city that never sleeps,

to the beard of Whitman full of butterflies,

to the roar of the big city in anarchic polychrome,

to no million dead.

I find myself a clown’s nose.

And scrap.

How many perspectives of the skyline have I done so far?

As many as there are towers,

of the world’s invisible hand, perhaps?

I hear a conversation, about the price of ice.

You (Madam Death) and I are on an embankment.

Theophilus Kwek is a prize-winning writer and researcher based in Singapore. The author of five volumes of poetry, he has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize, and serves as co-editor of Oxford Poetry. His essays, poems and translations have appeared in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, and the Mekong Review.

Pearl Bank

i.m. 1976-2019

The pillars, too, regret this.

The columns are full of outcry, staircases

weep, and the glass doors,

whose wheels are still running in their tracks.

In the driveway, left in haste,

are possessions too big for the moving-van:

a bedframe, a mahjong table

with its tiles discarded, a winning hand.

After this morning’s rain,

a smell of death has come to roost among

the debris. Look closely,

someone has emptied out the living,

out here, onto the street.

It is a difficult thing, to see a building

gape, and gape even wider

than the gap between its two front teeth.

Maybe it was the architecture

that singled it out. Socialist,

so, unfit for our times.

No room now for rooms like these,

level lives, a piece of God’s

blue sky for everyone. Capital, land –

the price has changed, though

old factors remain. What, then?

something new must come.

There will be rain again, and rain over

the earth, till another grain

sleeps, wakes, becomes a pearl.

Millicent A. A. Graham lives in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of two collections of poetry The Damp In Things (Peepal Tree Press, 2009) and The Way Home (Peepal Tree Press, 2014).  She is a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, 2009 and an awardee of the Michael and Marylee Fairbanks International Fellowship to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, 2010.  

Her work has been published in: So Much Things To Say 100 Calabash Poets; the Jamaica Journal; Caribbean Writer; BIM; City Lighthouse, Yonder Awa, an anthology of Scottish and Caribbean writers for the Empire Cafe Project and most recently in A Strange American Funeral, edited by Freya Field-Donovan and Emmie McLuskey and designed by Maeve Redmond.  Millicent is co-founder of The Drawing Room Project Ltd.

The Yard

We lived our lives among things that decayed.

In the yard, the carcasses of deportees

became our refuge when we were afraid.

Inside their rust fatigue is where we’d be,

watching the emerald-dragon dart its tongue

to stab the diamond-back spider that spun

its silver in the hollows of the frame.

We learned the normalcy of death, and shame

of sitting by powerless, worst, reluctant

to intervene. Trapped in that web we glimpsed

darkness through the bangs of a flapping door,

we felt dread forming from its metaphor

and our hearts grew giant.

How memories seem to jab away at us,

even as we live inside their rust.

~

Going Home

– for Cooper

As men slam shut the market gate,

my goats whine for the old estate.

The sun slipped from the sky so fast

I never saw them separate!

The trucks pack up each soul at last;

a few walk on ahead. They cast

their shadows on the lucid street;

I watch them move through ginger grass.

No one has stopped for me as yet;

the goats want nothing else to eat,

so I just catch my breath; I know

that dark is curling round my feet.

No shortcut through the ginger row –

my zinc house is jus a stone-throw.

I’ll soon untie the rope and go

I’ll soon untie the rope and go.

~

Prayer for Morning

The moon is rising on the hill’s back;

my madda is not home as yet,

and in the corners, inky and black,

the daddy-long-legs plot and plat.

The candles dart their tongues like spears,

and light that ought to lick out fears

instead climbs curtains, clambers chairs

to start a burning spring of tears.

We clasp our hands, we say our prayer –

Please let the morning find us here.

Outside, lizards kibber their sounds

and crickets trade-in violins

for thunderclaps and silvery live rounds,

while daddy-long-legs weave their homes.

An ole dog pokes his nose and barks,

piercing my ear, scratching his mark.

Holes in the walls, holes is the heart!

The moon is cold, the lanes are dark.

We clasp our hands, we say our prayer –

Please let the morning find us here.

Lock up the louvre, latch the grill gate,

out every candle that might light

the corners where daddy-long-legs wait.

Only Madda must know this hiding place.

The outside shadows secrets keep,

so mind the door, and fight off sleep;

the moon’s face holds – breath taken deep,

’fraid for the daddy-long-legs creep.

So clasp your hands, and say your prayer:

Please let the morning find you here.

Peepal Tree Press, 2014

Millicent A. A. Graham lives in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the author of two collections of poetry The Damp In Things (Peepal Tree Press, 2009) and The Way Home (Peepal Tree Press, 2014).  She is a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, 2009 and an awardee of the Michael and Marylee Fairbanks International Fellowship to Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, 2010.  

Her work has been published in: So Much Things To Say 100 Calabash Poets; the Jamaica Journal; Caribbean Writer; BIM; City Lighthouse, Yonder Awa, an anthology of Scottish and Caribbean writers for the Empire Cafe Project and most recently in A Strange American Funeral, edited by Freya Field-Donovan and Emmie McLuskey and designed by Maeve Redmond.  Millicent is co-founder of The Drawing Room Project Ltd.

Yellow Dog

I

In the pitch black

shadow of a hill

the yellow dog rises, like a halo…

II

Under the tamarind tree

the grasses shoot-

the yellow dog digs them out furiously!

III

The statue’s head is rolling-

the yellow dog is yelping,

I closed my eyes and whisper

in tandem, ‘Amen,  amen.’

IV

The yellow dog turns his eye on me.

I taste vinegar, think, ‘It is finished!’

V

The shame in me bent into a bow,

like the lapped tail

of the yellow dog.

VI

An old moon lifts through the air’s raw scent-

the yellow dog drags its belly

on the pavement.

VII

I hang my head in shame

having seen the faces that spat

as the yellow dog drifted through

my thoughts …

VIII

All I have seen is nothing

compared to the yellow dog

whose tongue hangs out at the

sight of

Everything!

IX

The sun goes down

The yellow dog is licking its groin.

X

Digging down to the earth’s core, I

came upon

the molten leer of the yellow dog.

XI

The world was asleep: a painting

in which nothing moved but for

the yellow dog’s jaundiced eye.

~

Rain Days

I watched with weightlessness little ones

bursting puddles as they pushed

off with naked soles against the wet

road, chasing shoes! The gutters broke;

torrents usurped their leather boats.

The streets were patent where wiggled once

the toes of sodden girls with tunic hems

hoisted to expose clear beads in mid-swell.

I was heavy, too heavy for rain jewels.

My mother said, “Tie yuh shoes-lace,

mind cloud-water pools, know only the dry.”

Not this ache for rain days

Now, regret like ring worm

bluing and young limes cannot heal;

these feet that restrained the heart

and kept me raw, far from the damp in things.

~

Conversations

At the standpipe the women hold

their bellies and swing the dented pails,

empty and dry as the loosening gold

that rises as the evening light flails.

As if there was no drought, no barren earth,

they gather, old fashioned urns, faithful,

waiting for some favourable word;

but the time trickles, and the waters pull

back, until only thirst is in this age,

and the urns are baked with sore regret.

Yet still they wait for water to delay

the hardening of their bodies with its wet

I hear their whispers rising dry as dust,

see faces; shadow-carved; see buckets rust.

Peepal Tree Press, 2009

Shelly Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eight volumes of poetry (Alban Lake and Math Paper Press), a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai (Urbanatomy), and a book on classical Chinese gardens (Hong Kong University Press). She has translated work from the Chinese for Penguin Books, Epigram Publishing, the National Library Board in Singapore, Giramondo Books, and Rinchen Books. Shelly’s poetry has appeared in journals, magazines, and websites around the world, as well as in several art exhibitions. Her translation of Sheng Keyi’s Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012, and her translation of You Jin’s In Time, Out of Place was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2016.  You can visit her website at shellybryant.com.

Jisei, 2003

In some cultures, it is noble to take one’s own life for honor and loyalty.

In most cultures, it is noble to give one’s life for another, even if not to take it with one’s own hand.

I do not hesitate. I plunge. I preserve not life, not its seed, but the possibility of both.

I bid Europa farewell as I fall.

This is what I was made for, my pro-life suicide dive.

built to destroy

in preserving your hopes

– Jupiter calls

~

Prayer and Meditation

indifference an admirable goal

when polar opposites remain

such close cousins – phobia and fetish

sink and swim, left and right

must no religion always mean

we are left without a prayer

~

when Copernicus said

we are not the universe’s centre

they mocked and held it against him

then held it over him

why is it their names

that no one now remembers?