In addition to featuring my short story Terra Incognita, Ruminate Magazine also invited me to write something on the issue’s theme of exposure for the “Last Note” section in the back of the magazine.
This was one of those pieces that wouldn’t come out when I tried, and I just had to wait until it smacked me upside the head. Honestly, writing sometimes feels more like being a conduit than a producer.
Bamboo Telegraph, published by the American Women’s Association, featured my poem Hiraeth in the July/August 2018 issue:
Hiraeth
but on a future page, I write hiraeth,
letters straddled by blank lines,
storks in a lake sky white, black feet in the danger
of events waiting to encircle the definition
a homesickness for a home
you cannot return to,
or that never was
a casual elimination of past and future, the place
where I was born but never lived,
the towns
where I lived but wasn’t from,
the undiluted person I could have become,
the safely planted future I could have raised,
the past stitched into place with swift
dips of an easy needle
I have made a home in the homesickness,
in the hiraeth – a here
with its end
smudged long by fuzzed, unfamiliar reeds
and I have sowed it in my future, where
the person I do not know yet, the person I will be
will find it
and remember that
she can never return to me
Bamboo Telegraph, published by the American Women’s Association, featured my poem Salvage in the May/June 2018 issue!
Salvage
The paper moon sleeps
in a notebook
above a massacre of pen caps
and mislaid chunks of words
which weren’t evacuated with
the mouths that, spit and teeth and tongue,
allowed them to live.
Only oddities remain,
staying, swearing, staring.
Survivors that have all their syllables
are snapped up by the harassed and indifferent
and taken to some poem,
some book, some brittle literature.
And when the slips of remainders, the
afterthoughts, the words we say we want
to take back
but will actually obliterate,
squirm through the hacked silence
in the dirt,
I get on my hands and knees
and salvage.
Published on March 1, 2014 in the Singapore American Newspaper:
Pregnant with screaming bodies,
the rides lurched overhead
like drunk Christmas trees.
But before the night took us there,
the cows, quieted by evening,
slept or shuffled on either side
of the barn’s opened belly.
Their prize ribbons swung above,
a dribbling rainbow nailed up
by its strings and pride.
I didn’t look up,
distracted by the tongue braceleting my wrist
and sanding down my knuckles,
the press of the calf’s nose into the cup of my palm.
For Dad’s Birthday 2008
