倾国倾城后 • After Aspasia

Glossy skin     plucked brows
 
            she cooked in the open
 
                          sweat, mosquitoes
 
 
What made do as a sink:
 
            silver container held up by a crooked pipe  
 
            going into the hard sand
 
 
Tried to leave, again and again;
           
after the day my toes first went grey
           
             the colour never fully left
 
 
Spirit in a big rock
 
            minerals unknown; nothing special
 
            aluminum altar
 
 
Everyone         every animal
           
            gets a default name
           
            dog after colour
 
            as with guppies and toddlers
 
 
Notes in between lines
 
            dusty brown texts, ‘readers’
 
            memorised, meter helping
 
            to prove/reach/appear
           
                       
Kitchen knife for now
 
            hanging on its nail
 
                        piece of raffia
 
 
Wart keeps returning
           
            layer after layer
 
            apply crimson vinegar concoction
 
 
Smoke and drink
 
            smell in cranny
 
            sand in eye
           
            one eye clouding
           
            then the other
 
 
Exercise: revise out loud:
 
            from the page through the brain through the mouth.
 
 
A raw egg, whole
           
 
Stone god all she had
 
            to stop a drunken knife          
 
            that cut fruit, chicken, flesh . . .
 
 
Burnt paper
 
            bits of red dashed on stone
           
 
The colour barked on its chain
 
            its sound exactly like its colour

Koh Xin Tian is a writer, editor, and translator from Singapore. She has an MFA in poetry from West Virginia University, where she served as poetry editor of the Cheat River Review.
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