Poems from Perfectly Bruised (Flying Islands Press, 2019)
Perfectly Bruised is a bilingual ‘selected poems’, in English and Mandarin. The translators were Bei Bei Chen and Karen Kun. Copies of this book are available at the shop.
Interrupting the bread-making
The frost has woken her early
She pads into the freezing kitchen
in her hand-me-down quilted dressing-gown
sniffing the yeasty air
She is discovering for the first time
her father’s secret early-morning life
Almost younger than words,
she can only stroke solemnly
the ears of the knitted rabbit
cradled in her arm
and watch as her father
clapping flour from his grey hands
wrenches open the door of the pot-bellied stove,
prods a roaring orange monster mouth
with a dark metal wand
There are nuggets inside, blurred with flame
They flare and settle, the mouth
spits little pellets of grey
onto the hearthstone
like biscuit crumbs, like bread crumbs
She reaches for them, too late
the air is full of loud
and from that moment
the word No is black and orange and ash,
is the sound of skin sizzling,
is the texture of a puckered fingertip,
and Don’t touch somehow smells
like coking coal and yeast and father,
and curiosity, stubbornness, defiance,
sting like bare feet on a winter morning,
chafe like coarse wool
dig like a dressing-gown cord
pink, frayed, tied too tight —
a cord which is not umbilical
but which is, nevertheless
a species of tether
Mother Love
Wave after wave, the ocean counts the cost
by piling sheets of water on the sand.
I dreamt before your birth that you were lost.
I think I have begun to understand.
By piling sheets of water on the sand
the sea offers its body, slice by slice.
I think I have begun to understand.
I love you knowing sorrow is the price.
The sea offers its body, slice by slice,
heaving itself onto an empty beach.
I love you knowing sorrow is the price.
I start a task whose end I’ll never reach.
Heaving itself onto an empty beach,
the sea still finds the energy to give.
I start a task whose end I’ll never reach.
I give you life, not knowing how you’ll live.
The sea still finds the energy to give.
I dreamt before your birth that you were lost.
I give you life, not knowing how you’ll live.
Wave after wave, the ocean counts the cost.
