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by Lune Loh
IN PANJANG, LONG THE KAMPUNGS LIVE
Senja:
Even evenings feared to extinguish torches
when granite-skinned invaders carved out days.
Jelapang:
The Temenggung distinguished pellets here;
Dull were the meals, but shiny were the targets.
Segar:
Cempedak fall as the youth of morning rays,
like white soldier bust, statuesque gleams.
Fajar:
Sunrise ends with the sun relearning to float
without the horizon, or propped on western masts.
Bangkit:
Here the concrete tangles in memory of jungles,
which gotong royong imports, and unravels.
Pending:
The city and heartlands weaved into a steaming ketupat,
their touring descendants burned fingers, used to belts.
Petir:
Before the thunder, was the flash of the Chinese;
But claims remain to be seen, blood splashed louder.
- A Memory is a corridor, blocks of neighbors arranged by mynahs assigning names to numbers, distracted by sambal odors on familiar strangers.
- Malaya was the matriarch of vinyl ghosts by early 1965, tied to a dance move poring over headbands worn in squares, a sly disembodied voice.
- The Widow is a painter of decaying portraits, the whisper of mattresses cleaning urine by locked gates, fine disappearance of brown leaves.
- A Can is a colorful, pastel competition in concrete sleeping, an obituary after late 1965 to bridge a solitary charter, a trashing callback.
- A Panda is the displacement of a restaurant, a hotpot of melting workloads divided into migrants, a consommé for forced safari bewilderment.
- Abuse is the reflection in a wheelchair, the scalding coupon used to takeout unfinished soup home, a bone carved into the ring of a cleaver
- Circus rides are vitamins owned by the childhood of Mercedes, the empty fish kissing conversation, of felines hybridized into ocean answers.  Lune Loh is an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore. She is a core member of Stop At Bad End Rhymes - SABER, an up-and-coming local writing collective first formed in 2017. Her poems have been published in both SingPoWriMo 2017 and SingPoWriMo 2018 (Math Paper Press), and Anima: The Poetics of Mirroring ( Squircle Line Press). She has been featured in LGBTQIA+ literary events in Singapore such as TransIt 2 and Contradiction XIII. She takes approximately 28 days to orbit around the Earth. Visit her website for her experimental forays. (Photo credit: Ng Yi-Sheng) |
