Robert Urban previews "Equal to the Earth"

Jee Leong Koh's new book of poetry EQUAL TO THE EARTH contains thoughtful meditations on the poet's social, sexual, ethnic and cultural impressions, relationships and alienations – presented in a unique style of wistful desire mixed with muted resignation. The book's title appears as a phrase in two poems – "Blowjob" and "Razminovenie, or Nonmeeting." By way of explaining EQUAL TO THE EARTH's overall theme, the title may be interpreted as meaning that the great longing one feels for that which one cannot have is equal, in magnitude, to the greatness of that which one cannot have.

Such has been the nature of The Muse for many a poet, and Koh is an inheritor of that venerable artistic sensibility.

Technically, many of Koh's poems read as non-rhyming prose poetically arranged into short lines and stanzas. Yet quite a few of the poems make use of clever, complex and well thought-out rhyme schemes. These include "Chapter Six: Anal Sex," "For Lonely," "Pickup Lines" and "The Far Ships."

The book's five chapters of poems are loosely grouped thematically:

Chapter One harkens back to classic Asian Imperial Court accounts. It imparts, if the term "orientalism" may be used, that atmosphere of labyrinthine bureaucracy, court intrigue and officiated virtue. On the surface all is modes of conduct, mannered observances, moral correctness. Yet underneath a more modern sense of romantic and sexual desire simmers.

As if mindful of the cultural heritage that permeates the writer's thinking in his life – Koh begins his book with his ethnic and literary roots. His choice of style here is not so cosmic or typically "poetical" as Zen Bhuddism or Taoism – but perhaps more Confucian in feel.

Heading towards Chapter Two, the subject matter of Koh's poetry fast-forwards to modern daily life. Yet they often keep the same formal, remote, almost polite style. The poetry is now more descriptive of his own life – revealing the alienation of the author as tourist, foreigner, immigrant, world traveler.

Chapters Three and Four contain quite a few poems on sexual relations and social communications – alienated, dense with meanings, and somewhat voyeuristic. Some appear coded in Koh's personal experiences. Many chronicle his travels and encounters as an Asian gay man in the modern world, especially in the West and especially in the U.S. Chapter Five takes the reader to Koh's socially estranged experiences on stereotypically (and for Koh, somewhat superficially) gay Fire Island.

Koh is skilled at poetically deconstructing gay sex roles, gay-straight relationships, coming out, and even gay sex toys. He also manages to infuse poetic craft into such mundane, municipal topics as immigration, tourism and citizenship. No small task.

Ultimately, Koh remains somewhat of a stranger-in-a-strange-land in many of the book's poems – gently alienated from his topics, his own sexuality and other people. I was several times reminded of Joni Mitchell's conversational, outsider-styled song lyrics while reading this book.

Koh as a poet understands art & sex as forces that both come from the same dark, inner, hard-to-grasp place. He is that kind of artist that struggles within the eternal, pulsar-like oscillation between the Dionysian temptations of creating sex and the studied, Apollonian thoughtfulness of creating poetry about sex. Koh lives and writes in that space created by the tug between the two. EQUAL TO THE EARTH is one of his results.

--Robert Urban, Urban Productions, NYC

Poem: For Lonely

For Lonely

Lying on top of you, my arms and knees
support my body even as I grope
for how much of me your frame will carry.

You hold me closer, you’re not heavy. So
I lean a ladder into you, step hard
up, and clamber to the top window

to hear you play Chopin’s Etude in C
Minor. I enter through the window, drop
into your room. I sit down quietly.

You come to a passage hazardous and slow
like footsteps on decaying floorboards
of an old house. The pedal mutes the piano.

Then I become afraid you will not be
playing, beside me, with such quiet hope
forever, for nightfall, for lonely,

and what that will do to me. I tiptoe
to the window while stroking your forehead,
lean back into myself, walk away below.

Poem: Ten Poems on the Plum Blossom

Ten Poems on the Plum Blossom

This happened in Jiangnan Province in 1658—on Mao Xiang’s country estate, Chen Weisong met and flirted with a servant Xu Ziyun beneath the plum trees. Chen was thirtytwo years old and Xu was fifteen and famous for his flute playing. When Mao wanted to punish Xu for aspiring above his status, Chen pleaded on the servant’s behalf. Mao demanded from Chen one hundred poems on the subject of the plum blossom the next morning in exchange for not punishing Xu. After Mao had received the poems, he released Xu to Chen. Being only one tenth the poet Chen Weisong was, I wrote “Ten Poems on the Plum Blossom” for my Xu who is also my Mao.


1.

The old branch blossoms in the snow,
pink lips on a low brown bough.
I see your face in the whitewashed hall
and remember home in Singapore.


2.

Back home in Velvet Underground last year,
you stuttered your coming out in a poetry slam.
I did not hear your pink confession then.
Now in New York, I hear you loud and queer.


3.

Walking down Broadway, you digress to decree
which man scorches or not. Sharp noses, those
Jews’, are extremely hot. Alternately
hot and cold, I try not to think of my nose.


4.

You do not see the tea list right before
your nose; the waitress and I laugh at you.
I muss up your hair—no white streak—
almost kiss the petal of your cheek.


5.

Plum blossoms keep me up all night,
keep flowering slowly from my lesion,
flowering for no one, no reason.
Then daylight swabs the window white.


6.

Why am I not your type? Both Prunus mume,
both poets, Singaporeans, shy, unsavvy
men clambering up, hoping to get some...
fruit from a different tree? A chokecherry?


7.

Your Puerto Rican cherry’s sweet: he runs
his mother’s errands and, though home by nine,
tumbles more men than you and I combined.
How can I compete, souring in the sun?


8.

In your “The Astronaut and the Samurai,”
their culture clashes bar them from the sky.
Not now. Age is the newer prejudice—
old shoguns order flowers, not harakiris.


9.

In a short decade, you’ll turn thirtyfour
and long for a man a decade younger. Breech
bluelashed to the gnarled stake, you’ll reach
for pink buds and they will dance away, draw closer, dance away once more.


10.

Chinese plums do not ripen to rich blue,
delicious, cold and sweet. They do not bruise.
You know as well as I, they turn yellow and hard
stored in your golden vase, turn small and tart.

Poem: Taproot

Taproot

His words desert him this morning for downtown Manhattan,
carrying briefcases, newspapers and coffee. They do not speak
to each other. They’re thinking of memos, faxes and phonecalls.
They do not look at him, a Chinese wetback waiting to be picked
for a day’s work. Tiny jaws gnaw at him and he wants Matt.

The spotted knapweed migrates fast,
decimating the bluebunch wheat grass.
You can identify it by its pink blooms
in black mottled bracts on stem tips.

He hurries past fat black women prodding snappers which gape
on beds of ice, past the row of crones blistering next to their red
talismans and Iching hexagrams, their faces cracked
like parched ground, past the old men hunched over their paper
chessboards, rolling a cannon across the river or retreating an elephant.

Small populations can be uprooted
by digging and pulling. If they’re established,
spray Picloram at point five pounds
per acre when the plant is a bud.

He passes a boy practicing a Yao Ming hookshot seen on TV,
two young men outside Kowloon Trading stacking empty crates
into a van, the New Land Arcade that squats a quarterblock
and catches the eye with its tall, electrified gold letterings,
and clones of knickknack shops that claim Little Italy.

The weed is not just hungrier. Its taproot
secretes catechin which triggers natives
to kill their own cells. It is not just lean,
as one scientist puts it, but mean.

He plunges, two steps at a time, into Canal Street Station.
In the car’s electric lighting, he looks for Matt
in the young white men and lurches into them. The train shrieks.
Fulton Street. The grid has crazed into a maze deadended
by tower blocks, to be traced with the red thread of a previous visit.

Trials are being carried out
to determine if bioagents work.
The weevil is a candidate. A species
of seedhead gallflies looks promising.

He pulls Matt, word made flesh, out of his standard chair, out
of the office and its mite dusted carpet into the men’s and locks
their mouths. He works his man’s belt loose and turns him
round. Matt pulls his tan shirt over his head and arms. The tenant bends
over his white boy’s blue veined torso. This is also his farm.


*

Putting Down Taproot

For some reason I thought I should imbibe some science while feasting on graduate writing workshops. At informal weekly seminars, in the spirit of continuous learning, the science faculty was giving brief talks on a subject out of their field of specialization. The talks were open to all. They attracted a modest but devoted audience, not a bad showing for a small liberal arts college. The free pizza might have helped too.

Was it a physicist or a chemist who spoke about the spotted knapweed? I don’t remember. It was a woman who found a new weed while gardening, and went online to find out more. I followed her lead.




My research turned up university and state department websites aimed at American farmers. The websites, with titles like Idaho’s Noxious Weeds or Invasive Plants of Wisconsin, were similarly organized: Description, Prevention, Management. Having just arrived in the States, and hoping to find love and work here, I was sensitive to the characterization of the spotted knapweed as an alien threat to native plants. The language of the description, so eerily similar on the sites, started me thinking about what makes a plant a weed, and what makes it a crop. Human needs, yes, food, clothing, shelter. But also cultivation, which necessarily implies human culture. The difference between weed and crop is, in a significant sense, a cultural distinction.

As I was writing at that time a series of historical persona poems, I tried to stuff the knapweed into the mouth of a straw man, the first three stanzas of which went like this:


An Immigration Official Speaks on Pest Control

The spotted knapweed has dispersed from ten
counties to three hundred and twenty-six,
reducing the bluebunch wheat
grass and re-routing the elks.
Thirty-five states index it an invader.

You can identify it by its pink
to purple flowers, at times white, settling in stiff,
black-mottled bracts
on tips of terminal stems.
It winters in a rosette of deeply lobed leaves.

From central Europe, Russia and western Siberia,
this Eurasian weed arrived in discarded soil
used as ship ballast.
Riding on undercarriages,
it migrates along highways, railway tracks, utility lines.


Overrun by the weed of excitement, I took the draft to my writing class, as well as submit it for critique @ Poetry-Free-For-All, an online poetry workshop. The draft was justly torn apart. Neither dramatic nor a monologue, it was, as Ted from PFFA nailed it, “a book report.” Its polemic was self-righteous and unimaginative; it does not question itself.

A PFFA exercise stimulated an overhaul. Challenged to write a poem with a mixture of different styles, I thought of weaving a personal narrative through the knapweed rhetoric, in alternate stanzas. I did not merely want to put a face to the debate, as immigration advocates would say, I wanted to speak of my desires—to write, to love, to take root—fierce desires that seemed to justify anti-immigration fears.

A narrative would also give a shape, a momentum to the poem, in this instance, the shape and momentum of a journey through lower Manhattan that climaxes in a reversal of stereotypes, in an Asian penetrating a white man. I was only vaguely aware of what I know now: the men I want to fuck are men I really like, and so, the apparent act of possession is, for me, also one of surrender. The clues to this lay in the last three stanzas of my next big draft:


In the train’s electric lighting, he searches for Matt
in the young white men and loves each one. The train sings.
33rd Street. He comes up for air, and wades
to the tower block. Stopped by a dark-suit,
he scribbles his name, number and address at the front desk.

Small populations can be uprooted. If not, spray Picloram
but not near streams. Experiments are on-going to determine if
bio-agents work. A species of seed-head attack flies seems promising.

He sees Matt hunkered down in his trench. He pulls
the fighter out of his chair, out of the white office, out of
sight, into the bathroom, and closes his sphincter-
mouth on his mouth. He works Matt’s belt loose and turns him
round. Matt puts a leg up on the china bowl. He grips
the shaft of Matt’s torso and plants his rice. This is also his farm.


The writing was still rough, but the two different styles, underlined by different stanza sizes, played off each other nicely, as Harry, Searcher and Autumn @ PFFA helpfully confirmed. Harry also suggested replacing “seed-head attack flies” with “seed-head gallflies” to lower the noise volume, a suggestion I accepted immediately.

Having banged down the slats of the narrative, I examined the selection of details in the poem. The knapweed stanzas still felt too prosaic and choked. I did not think of writing them in prose; the next thing that overran my field of attention was Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Also a poem that deploys two different styles, it accentuates the distinction through different line lengths.


xxxxxShe looked over his shoulder
xxxxxxxxFor vines and olive trees,
xxxxxMarble well-governed cities,
xxxxxxxxAnd shapes upon untamed seas,
xxxxxBut there on the shining metal
xxxxxxxxHis hands had put instead
xxxxxAn artificial wilderness
xxxxxxxxAnd a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
xxxNo blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
xxxYet, congregated on its blankness, stood
xxxAn unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

(from the opening of “The Shield of Achilles”)


The song measure orchestrates phrase and line, giving the story of Thetis and Hephaestos the appropriate classical grace and gravity. Though my poem was non-metrical, I thought I could lighten the knapweed stanzas by using shorter lines. Shortening the lines required weeding the stanzas, a very good thing as it turned out. I reworked the 3-line stanzas into quatrains, with one phrase to each line, and with a shift in the middle of the quatrain, like that of Auden’s octet. For instance, the first two knapweed stanzas:


The spotted knapweed has migrated to three hundred
and twenty-six counties, reducing the bluebunch wheat
grass and re-routing the elks. Forty states index it an invader.

The weed winters in a rosette of deeply lobed leaves.
You can identify it in summer by its pink to purple
blooms in stiff, black mottled bracts on stem tips.


became in the revision:


The spotted knapweed migrates fast,
decimating the bluebunch wheat grass.
You can identify it by its pink blooms
in black-mottled bracts on stem tips.


The stanza moves more quickly, at a speed more suggestive of the weed’s dispersal, and of the speaker’s panic. When I posted the revised poem @ PFFA, romac agreed with Lola Two’s assessment that “the italicized conceit is carefully phrased (it could easily have lapsed into textbook prose) and effective. An excellent example of ironic illustration.”

And yet. And yet. What if prose is the right form for the knapweed material which, after all, is written that way on all those university and state department websites? What if my revision of the knapweed stanzas was based on the wrong diagnosis of the problem? What if my creative writing teacher was right, the knapweed stanzas are overly intellectualized and emotionally manipulative, and should be removed? The field of possibilities. To turn once more to the conceit, how does one distinguish between crop and weed? The published poem once fed, clothed and sheltered me. It will not do now, but perhaps it may for someone else. Pizza, anyone?

Poem: Hungry Ghosts 7

1. The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity
2. The Scholar Minister Gives Career Advice
3. The Emperor's Male Favorite Waits Up for Him
4. The Taoist Magician's Last Address
5. He Bids His Brotherly Lover Farewell
6. The Connoisseur Inspects the Boys


7. Hungry Ghosts

My father took me picnicking in Hell
in Tiger Balm Gardens when I turned five.
Horseface and Oxhead flanked the door to quell

tourists, returning ghosts, recaptured live.
Small spectator of retribution’s drama,
I shuffled through the dark; I’d rather dive

in and out but the crowd before King Yama
passed as if shackled by the chains of crime.
Father explained to me the law of Karma

while a mirror screened a whole lifetime
in a flash. Jostled into Court One, I balked
at heads and arms and legs, in bloody mime,

stuck out from under giant slabs of rock,
impossible to tell which limb belonged
to which gory head on the granite block

(Father said, Unfilial boys, they wronged
their parents who gave them everything);
into Court Two where sinners had their tongues

pierced by long knives for lifelong gossiping;
in Three, the greedy were handcuffed and whipped;
the tax evaders, in Court Four, drowning;

one body blurred into another, stripped
of eyes or bowel, heart torn out with a hook,
and on a hill of swords a traitor was flipped.

It wasn’t me. It wouldn’t be. I shook
as if my bones, and not that man’s, were scraped
by sharpeners, for writing a dirty book,

my butt, and not his, by a spear tip raped.
Expecting the worst horror in Court Ten,
I imagined punishments nightmare shaped.

A blue wheel, painted on the back of the den,
displayed the paths for the purged souls’ rebirth
as insects, fish, birds, animals or men

depending on each individual’s worth.
The worst are born as hungry ghosts, Father said
and strode ahead of me out from the earth.

Under a raintree’s shade, he laid out bread,
ham, apple juice. I still didn’t feel well.
Eat. Don’t waste food, Father said. We fed.

*

I’m turning thirtyfive today at Soul
Mountain, Connecticut, USA,
a Writing Resident on foreign dole.

Winston is coming up for my birthday.
I’m walking with a black dyke poet called
Venus, along the river’s snowpacked way.

I tell her, smiling, I must have been installed
as an emperor’s favorite boy in a past life
after I schemed to pleasure those blue balled.

I was a Taoist priest who left his wife
for Mount Tai to achieve immortal fire.
Such hunger turns fruit to flame, nuts to knives.

I tell her my book rises on dammed desire,
a book my father would have called dirty.
Last summer, tired of being damned a liar,

I stopped Father from switching on the TV
and announced to my parents I am gay.
I talked too much. He didn’t look at me.

When I wound down, he mumbled, It’s okay,
and flicked the TV switch. In bed, that night,
he consoled Mother that every family prays

a secret sutra that is hard to recite—
a crippled son, retard or murderer.
Mother repeated to me his insight.

He treated Winston to a satay dinner
at Lau Pa Sat and tried to make small talk.
He has not asked me about him ever.

The air nips us. Venus cuts short her walk
and retreats indoors to make a late breakfast.
I’m left standing beside the golden stalks

of cattails tall as I am, gazing across
the river to trees branching spears and barbs.
A deer noses the brown scrub. Then a burst

of knocking, from the thicket, the smart stabs
of a woodpecker tapping in a bowl
of bark. I should go. Winston’s coming up.


*First published in Boxcar Poetry Review.

Poem: Hungry Ghosts 5

1. The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity
2. The Scholar Minister Gives Career Advice
3. The Emperor's Male Favorite Waits Up for Him
4. The Taoist Magician's Last Address


5. He Bids His Brotherly Lover Farewell

Drained, you crawl up my flank and hear the flood
subside. This light on us is of the moon.
Again you ask me to explain love’s well spring
at Kuanyin Temple lucky for rain prayers.

When you strode to the altar, how the men stared
at your unblemished skin, your torso snared
in a much mended jacket made of goat.
The gods desired you, even the Jade Emperor.

Of all the powdered faces there, you spoke
to the plainest. Can you explain why? No?
Nor can I. Mother drank your cup of tea
and liked you, loved you like another son.

In that year, Xuanzong abdicated breath
and his son’s reign inaugurated our days
of picking pekoe leaves on rippling slopes
and nights of sipping tea. A week of years.

Don’t forget the presents for your bride.
I’ve packed and left them on the kang for you.
She’s gentle, pretty, with childbearing hips.
Your fathers must have sons to sacrifice

at the ancestral altar, offer meat
and wine, or else their ghosts get hungry.
As the dead sage dictates, a ruler should
be a ruler, a father father, a son son.

I’ve done my duty by you. I can do
no more. Oh, how pathetic that sounds!
I’m turning woman, so no more of this.
See, passion is a tide. My body’s dried.

*

Poem: Hungry Ghosts 4

1. The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity
2. The Scholar Minister Gives Career Advice
3. The Emperor's Male Favorite Waits Up for Him


4. The Taoist Magician’s Last Address

My followers, I am about to turn immortal.
After ingesting cinnabar for years,
I’ll soon become like Princely Qiao and Song.

You know the costs, I have spoken of them,
when I was stricken by the longing to live,
how longing broke and drove me out of me—

resigned from lucrative town temple posts,
slept in a different bedroom from my wife,
and even sent away the serving boy.

When lust sneaked past the bodyguards yet again,
I ran away to live in mountain caves,
ate aerial roots, blue stamens and stone ears.

The Master of the Bamboo Grove is right,
the musk deer grows fragrant from eating cedar
and so I drained my body of its swamp.

You know how many come to mock my work.
Armed with their science and senses, they joke,
“Immortals must be good at lying low!”

They see the worms on cusps of lips and think
death is the common lot. The fools! The fools!
To eke one living from the land and ache

over the scrimped allotment! So I leave
them to their fate and ready mine for change.
The thorny limebush crosses the Huai River…

et cetera. I bequeath to you my scrolls.
Practice your breathing every dawn and dusk
and rest early. Preserve your energy.

Remember: don’t nail shut my coffin lid
but fetter me in a strong crimson net.
I’ll move through it to immortality.

*

Poem: Hungry Ghosts 3

Posting this a day earlier than usual, because I'm heading to Philadelphia for the ALSC conference.


1. The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity
2. The Scholar-Minister Gives Career Advice

3. The Emperor’s Male Favorite Waits Up for Him

Holding the mirror, I study my plucked eyebrows,
xxxxxxworry my fringecurl,
xxxxxxxxxxxxtouch my lips with rouge.

He gave me this mirror. On its back, twin dragons
xxxxxxbraid their jadescaled
xxxxxxxxxxxxbodies into sinew.

The Peach Terrace glints under the autumn moon,
xxxxxxpink as skin seen
xxxxxxxxxxxxthrough red silk gauze.

Are the lights in the Audience Hall still burning
xxxxxxor has he removed Heaven
xxxxxxxxxxxxto some other room?

I asked Eunuch Shu earlier for the Emperor’s mood.
xxxxxxThe army has pushed back
xxxxxxxxxxxxthe barbarians, he said,

and recouped the loss of ten frontier towns
xxxxxxthey took from us
xxxxxxxxxxxxa month ago.

A victory then. Another change. The wine has turned cold.
xxxxxxOn the old coverlet,
xxxxxxxxxxxxthe kingfisher molts.

*

Poem: Hungry Ghosts 2

1. The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity


2. The Scholar Minister Gives Career Advice

He has come to display his respect and so court my support,
this young scholar who topped the imperial examination,
xxxxxlike so many before him year after year.

Already he follows the fashion of snipping a sleeve.
Already he wears a fine powder to whiten his face,
xxxxxaccentuate his swallow brows.

He refreshes this ashen room like spring rain. A young bamboo
at once strong and supple, he flowers but yearns to buckle
xxxxxhis body in a public robe.

In my hands The Sayings—the graying calligraphy,
the bamboo ribs bound by a belt of twine and worn
xxxxxby age and use. The sage’s words

are imperial edicts engraved on the heart’s bronze urn.
He’s repeating his question. I answer, Virtue is forged
xxxxxthrough loyal service to the court.

*

Poem: Blowjob

Here's another poem from the book. I wrote it a year or two after meeting up with a childhood friend again, in Singapore. The encounter never quite left me, but I found the words for it only during my MFA, when the thought of his job sent me reading up on oil-rigs. The poem gave me the title for the book.


Blowjob

Are you a survivor who, on touching land, shine
your torch into the sea or are you a rock warning?
Like a light seen across wide waters, your cig glows
in the dark before your face appears out of the fog:

the boy, now a man, who described to me a blowjob,
what I already knew but let you go on and on
for I saw you enjoyed drawing from me the filament
of illicit thrill (your wiry dark limbs were my thrill).

The wink of your dare beckoned me whenever I heard
of you knocking about from job to job—a surf
instructor on Thai beaches, short order cook
in Hanoi, coowner of a canoe shop, part time guide,

and now a roustabout, a proper job this time,
you explain, despite its name. You raise offshore oilrigs
against seaquakes, steel the derrick and crown from which
roughnecks slam the toothed bit into the ocean bed,

pump mud into the pipe to grease the bit and prevent
cave ins and blowouts by equalizing bore pressure
with the earth’s. You master the force compressing bones
to crude trapped in the domes of the earth’s scrotum.

Months you slave at sea, then retire to your rented space:
a chair, video machine, opened tins on kitchen shelves.
The bedroom is the most done up, with kingsized bed,
vanity table, woman. Your girlfriend of three years.

Oil rigging is hard work, you flex your arms, but it pays
for this and trips to Bali, six months combing the beach.
You show me, from your window, the oil refinery glows
in the dark, with glimmering towers, balconies and spheres—

your Atlantis. I think of my sterile office with its unforgiving
light; each night I leave it and swim out into the sea
where you already have someone to traverse the girders
of your thighs, her mouth a valve to regulate your gusher.

You are not a lighthouse for passing ships. You loom,
a derrick, stapled to the ground, drilling and drawing oil
till it dries. Seen under stars, you are exerting a force equal
to the earth’s and burning its fuel for a little heat and light.


published in Mimesis, and Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia.

"Brother": Poem selected for "Best New Poets"

Chloe suggested that I post a poem from the new book to give a smidgeon of taste. So, here is "Brother," which begins the fourth section of the book. The poem was selected by Natasha Trethewey for the Best New Poets 2007 anthology, published by the University of Virginia Press.


Brother

In mother’s womb, we started as a pair of lungs,
sea slugs hanging on to a reef. We grew toe rays,
brain sponges and gonads relaxed by the liquid song.

The Doppler ultrasound echoed our submarine
and found us one. The truth was monozygotic—
we sucked each other’s nub of thumb inside the brine.

When, headfirst, we were unceremoniously expelled,
we were halved like an egg sliced with a line of hair.
A beak plucked at the cord and knotted my navel.

Mother never speaks of you although I know
you were with me at sea. How else to understand
my panic playing hide and seek, the cracked canoe,

wet dreams of touching a man, waking up, a curse
crying, not knowing why, like a turtle washed ashore,
a lacquered carapace—these shimmering absences?


First published in The Ledge Magazine, Best New Poets 2007, and Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia.