Singapore, Superstitious by Amrita V. Nair
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy
Once again, I forget -
That the Circle Line
isn’t really a circle at all,
and get on the train
at Dhoby Ghaut
to get to One-North.
Things could be worse,
You say.
Middle seat on the plane.
Cracked mirror.
Resting sad face.
Alarm goes off too late.
Bad hair months, not days.
Wrong time, wrong place.
It hasn’t helped me at all
to know the details,
Of all the worse luck -
That my bad luck has saved me from.
Worse things happen at sea
You say.
But of course, that’s no relief.
When we live on an island.
When we are always at sea.
“The reason why I’ve not sent this out anywhere is because it feels kind of like a Frankenstein’s monster of a poem - like it should actually be two poems - or like it has some superfluous elements in it that render it unlovable to most readers. There is a Cormac McCarthy quote to start off with - already a bad sign – especially if you consider that at the time of writing this poem, I had read exactly zero books by McCarthy and mostly just knew his work based off of all the quotes and tributes that people shared of him after his passing.
The stanzas seem to be kind of all over the place, tonally.
There is also a hyperlocal reference to the Singapore MRT line in the first stanza that readers outside Singapore would not relate to or understand. (Essentially, the MRT’s Circle Line is an incomplete loop at the moment, that is slated to be closed in 2026. As a result, if you, like the speaker of this poem, were to take the direct train on it from Dhoby Ghaut to One-North rather than transferring to a different line, you’d be stuck on the MRT for an extra 20 minutes or so.) I confess that I like that it’s a bit of a hot mess and couldn’t bring myself to edit it further or to send it out to anyone who wouldn’t see that much like Frankenstein’s monster, this poem too wants to be loved for what it is.”
Amrita V. Nair (she/her) is a writer and researcher from Kerala, who currently lives in the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples (Vancouver, Canada). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Yuzu Press, Anak Sastra, and Tiny Wren Lit, and was included in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems. Website: www.amritanair.com