Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (Hong Kong)

It is Impossible to be Partially Gutted

i
I vow never to speak to him again.

.

ii
If you know what he said to me,
you’ll understand—
Words coming out of his fingers,
in the cold darkening night: ‘I feel nothing
inside’, ‘plaything’.
.

You see, he sharpened
his words, each a blade, ready to kill.
He intensified his skills.
.

Maybe he’s a fisherman, and I his flesh.
He said as much: ‘I hooked your chin,
and pulled you in’. ‘My most beautiful catch.’
.

Not only chin. Someone’s mocked heart was curbed;
it dangled, shivered ever so slightly on display.
Do fish cry? Their tears mistaken for stubborn mist.
.

iii.

These are no lover’s rites.
I vow never to open my mouth again.

In Expectation
.

Only I know that crying baby on the moving train
cannot annoy me. My mind is elsewhere.
You’re merely a connection away,
clutching to your phone, reading my messages.
Hope my sweetness slept well last night,
after hopping from train to train.
/
Can one partially belong to someone?
I have no former template for this.
Why did I agree to meet?
You are not natural elements: wind, rain,
sun, snow, even rainbow,
to be silently endured from below.
.
They say memory has limits.
A poem so long that one forgets its beginning
at the end loses its identity; is no poem at all.
I think it best to make our encounters brief:
not too vast, too rich, too sore, too deep.
.
Who knows? These mouthful moments may
implant impenetrably deep. One day, if we have
emotional aphasia, all we can remember
are these remnants, overpowering:
a vow of silence, a blue drink,
poetry books you carry with you.
Words whispered into the ear:
“Can you imagine if we were together;
would we ever sleep?”

.

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, UK. She is founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (http://asiancha.com). More about Ho at www.sighming.com.