Born and raised in Hong Kong, Cleo Adler holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Comparative Literature. She writes poetry, essays, and reviews about travel and introspection, memory, and music. Published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Tentacle Poetry, and Literary Shanghai. She works between archives and libraries.
Three Questions
‘L’ is a sly and sluggish sound crawling out from the tip of the tongue,
as in ‘lax’, ‘listless’, and ‘nonchalance’, where ‘nonchalance’
is the mask worn by men whose tongues curl back
and roll out an ‘r’ in a matter of milliseconds that measures their effort.
How many words can we learn humming Simon and Garfunkel songs?
With my ears, I almost feel by touch their mouths stretch,
lured to suck their smacking lips and gnawing teeth.
I’ll never make their tongue mine,
but mine can coil around theirs and glide along slippery waves.
When I was four, I hated drawing curves so much that I cried
when copying the number ‘3’ ten times but
in my youth, I flaunted cursive writings in my homework.
It’s a tempting exercise to sketch a map of a walnut
since there’s no single way of making out its furrows.
How I dream of claiming it my laurel.
What good do words do?
They think theirs open up a meadow of daffodils
where you see the sun in a new light.
I say they are a desert where what we do is walk in circles
because that’s how our body works, the same way
my skin is tanned and my tongue is stiff.
Everyone prefers sunshine that’s brighter, warmer, more upfront,
but what I covet is one I’ll never be, nor be a part of
— although it grows in me—
for all my pestering and whining,
for the sake of the sense or eros.
Are words a fish or a fish trap?
It’s not about how to get the fish and forget the trap.
I have trouble with spelling, so to me,
a nicely woven basket does little harm; what I want to
forget is the fancy that with it a fish will be given.
At the river near where I live, there are men who
catch fish and put them into large foam boxes.
The next moment, they toss them to egrets.
Let us go fishing there one day.