Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and graduate of the University of Cambridge. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and creative expression. He has recently been moved by the writing of Tse Hao Guang, Rodrigo Dela Peña Jr., and Balli Kaur Jaswal.
watching
waiting at the bus stop, two pull
up, departing in different roads. patrons
alight, soles on tarmac, late afternoon
hues of white or blue or green. hands
graze skin, children tugged along, screens
pocketed. the flurry weaves around my
bench, chatter blending into revved
engines. shorts and shoes move toward
the trail, cloistered between tracks and
concrete. eyes flash for a peacock or
chocolate pansy, those brilliant bursts
of orange, or the eerie dash of white,
emigrants drifting in the evening
breeze. midday flutters away, my
seat grows cold, and i dream of an
inch of another’s peace.
~
idiomatic
a small, needful brightness
worked his way through the
consonance of sunlight and
wind, at times unhurried, at
others with a turbulence like
red ants. once he faced a
cleaved road, elsewhere he
followed a stream back to
its spring. he sits in the shade
of old stories, however
atavistic, crawling with the
guilt of maternal likeness:
the silhouette of a bow,
curved as a snake, the ringing
of a bronze bell, hands cupped
over his ears, the sharpened
axe, clean through timber.
scrawled in dark ink, my teeth
begin to chatter, lips curved in
lashing strokes of red.
~
a likeness of flowers
after Wong Kar-wai
the past is something he
could see, but not touch:
years fading as if
glass had been pulverised
to grey ash, soot accumulating,
visible beyond grasp,
everything blurred and
indistinct. he yearns for all that
had left– if he could break
through that pile of
ash, return before the days began
to vanish, thumbs pressed,
anguish whispered, buried with
mud in the groove of a tree.
awakening
after Craig Arnold
to wake in the presence of
daylight, swollen eyes before
congealed lustre, sluggishly
unfurling between sorrow and
possibility. to live in the glory
of softness, before the deadened
grip of the day’s agitations, the
fumbling for a pressure valve,
a fire escape. to breathe in the nodes
of mirth, or are they a kneading
heaviness, the dull puncture of
flayed language? to see in the absence
of sequence, knife scraped against
serrated surface, the drum and rustle of
text and headline. to lean into opening
air, that sonorous exhalation,
particulate in a burnished dance. to
wake into rippling sunlight, diverting
the gaze, so tired from the gleam of
blue, to that beloved flash, that
effortless flicker. to wake in
the presence of daylight.