Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash
Samuel Caleb Wee
The Malayan Progress Workbook
Ekphrastic, after The Malayan Progress Workbook at the National Museum of Singapore
Ekphrastic, after The Malayan Progress Workbook at the National Museum of Singapore
*
(Bagatelle No. 25, in A minor):
*
Not a train of thought, but a bus from Katong, trilling up the checkpoint, recurring at Yong Peng. Rising fluently up the highway as a purling bubble: inevitable.
*
He wears a grey dress and reads Blake for the last time. No tygers left on his island, he thinks. No wild ones, at least.
*
Hands flat on the table, eyes closed, breathing four through the nose and seven in the hold. Expel through your mouth with your tongue at the roof.
*
When he opens his eyes, she has materialized.
*
He is Malaysian and he writes novels. No, he says to you. You’re still not confessing enough.
*
Colin Farrell, paunched and slope-shouldered. The mosaics of genitalia from your father’s collection. The rest I have lost.
*
A joke, in the language of your politics: pukimak kau besar macam Najib punyer bank account. You were not amused.
*
The limen of veranda. The capital flapped through. Revisit the evening now, and find it overwritten by the poetics of rain.
*
She was Bandar Utama with a British accent. I’m afraid of the city, she said. I’m a suburban kid.
*
Because you’d said once you’d run for the hills, he kept the word tightly dammed, like a secret. Three years, you said, three years he held it.
*
A rosette of lips. I interrupt your pragmatic. You, your exposure, your knees at your chest. My grey dress hanging off you like an anchor. That hour we smoked out on the veranda. A nest of lights, a dropping away, the veins of the city on the rattling partition; the hemline of my dress, bunched up around your waist. That was the way it was: two bodies, cleaving before the cleaving. Behind us, the cigarettes burned down to the filter.
*
When the dam burst at the end he was begging. By that point it was too late.
*
“But look: I have crumpled the peninsula for you.”
*
(Bagatelle No. 25, in A minor):
*
Not a train of thought, but a bus from Katong, trilling up the checkpoint, recurring at Yong Peng. Rising fluently up the highway as a purling bubble: inevitable.
*
He wears a grey dress and reads Blake for the last time. No tygers left on his island, he thinks. No wild ones, at least.
*
Hands flat on the table, eyes closed, breathing four through the nose and seven in the hold. Expel through your mouth with your tongue at the roof.
*
When he opens his eyes, she has materialized.
*
He is Malaysian and he writes novels. No, he says to you. You’re still not confessing enough.
*
Colin Farrell, paunched and slope-shouldered. The mosaics of genitalia from your father’s collection. The rest I have lost.
*
A joke, in the language of your politics: pukimak kau besar macam Najib punyer bank account. You were not amused.
*
The limen of veranda. The capital flapped through. Revisit the evening now, and find it overwritten by the poetics of rain.
*
She was Bandar Utama with a British accent. I’m afraid of the city, she said. I’m a suburban kid.
*
Because you’d said once you’d run for the hills, he kept the word tightly dammed, like a secret. Three years, you said, three years he held it.
*
A rosette of lips. I interrupt your pragmatic. You, your exposure, your knees at your chest. My grey dress hanging off you like an anchor. That hour we smoked out on the veranda. A nest of lights, a dropping away, the veins of the city on the rattling partition; the hemline of my dress, bunched up around your waist. That was the way it was: two bodies, cleaving before the cleaving. Behind us, the cigarettes burned down to the filter.
*
When the dam burst at the end he was begging. By that point it was too late.
*
“But look: I have crumpled the peninsula for you.”
*
That hour they smoked out on the veranda. He tried for a smoke ring. It collapsed at the centre. I’m afraid of the city, she said, I’m a suburban kid. This could have been my capital, he said. It could have been. But history happened.
|
Samuel Caleb Wee is a Singaporean writer whose poetry and non-fiction has appeared in publications such as Kitaab, OF ZOOS, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Esquire and August Man. A member of the poetry collective A.T.O.M., he is also the co-editor of this is how you walk on the moon, an anthology of experimental anti-realist fiction published by Ethos Books in 2016, and launched at the Singapore Writers Festival that year.
|
