Sad One, You Tell Me There Is Always Love & May Speaks to my Heart by Angela Yap
Sad One
I imagine the body as a poem.
Word by word, piece by piece.
Bone-fragile and never sleeps.
Adorn with petals-
No I prefer craters
carved on the anvil,
marking my body, stinging like nettles.
Then let it heal, let it be ugly/love
crusted upon baby skin, the lover
lost somewhere in translation.
Then gild it with gold/grief
like survival sculpted into
the body. It’ll never run cold.
My body/poem read too much
and loved not-enough.
I scrumple and tear it carelessly
just enough for it to survive/slowly
the poem becomes public property/
pollinated, imagined over and over
by people who do not know you.
My poem sits on the porch picking
at cellulite under lights as crows
do when carcasses crawl out of
pale-boned bins.
Let the body rest, the poem sleep.
Beauty will come another day.
You Tell Me There is Always Love
We were trying to skip stones by the coast of Tallinna
And I told you love means absolutely nothing
as the pebbles sunk with spiteful weight.
You told me of course it does, that love comes in
many forms,
The lovers in their eighties sitting inches away on sun-baked rock
No honeyed laughter, no interlocking fingers, no need for words
But shoulders ever so slightly touching.
One day when Love no longer announces
itself by our doorstep, we will take walks
together in the rain instead to keep each
other from slipping into slipped discs.
You say tenderness does not outgrow, only takes form
in the tendrils of time, weaving and knowing, softly subtly.
I ask you if you can see Finland on the other side
And you say perhaps because hope is better than none.
A child picks up kelp because she can
A man smokes his last cigar for the day
We are here because we can
And maybe I still don’t believe in love
But today I will believe in perhaps.
May Speaks to My Heart
It is May and too much red
like your Nana’s kompot
you left on the counter
overnight, mug rings
forming on placemats
or perhaps May
is the season of wearing
blood red lips after watching
Pulp Fiction one too many
times and wishing for your
life to be as garrulous. May’s
sparrows flitter by the water fountain,
signs of gentle life while you
soak in the miasmic backyard
marsh. It is May and you still cry in
the shower with the broken spout.
It is May and you feel in-between
the nadir of adolescence and adulthood.
You would like to drown occasionally,
but May does not permit. Wonder why the world spins
relentlessly and why your mother hates you. It is
May in its hideous unloveable form -
everything and nothing matters all
at once.
“These are three poems that have been residing in my recycle bin for about a year. Perhaps at the time of writing it, I quite liked them, maybe even submitted them on impulse. But after various rejections, I think all that was left to me were its many flaws. I picked the poems apart piece by piece until there was nothing left except disdain. Recently, I’ve been writing poetry again, and looking back, I can see my thought process behind each poem and the different scenes that inspired them, hence I decided to fish them out from the bin!”
Angela Yap (She/her) is an aspiring poet hailing from sunny-side Singapore. Her poems have been published in the Last Stanza Poetry Journal and Spark to Flame Literary journal.