Belle Koh Han Lyn: “Some Kind of Crossing ”
This poem has been formatted for desktop viewing. If you are reading on mobile, we recommend you view this page in landscape mode.
I begin to see her early
where the day is not yet day
and we're premature, so near
to the world it must still be without us.
Bodies mass like white nights,
transparent and luminous, moving nothing, one passing
rotation around a burning junction awakened
only to itself.
She's neck-deep in the street,
the leaves blowing so fast
there's nothing I can do to keep her from going away.
Love, stay in the dark
amidst the surrendering,
the whiteflies and the workers, the electronic traffic sign
sent by God as a warning to "SLOW DOWN"
while you can.
I'll never catch her, ghost of my future,
escape-artist phantom darting ten years ahead of me.
She's thinking of leaving for another country.
Where the bushes are red and the language of her heart
isn't a microscope of the shameful and unwanted.
In the street where I walked with my parents before I became myself,
I see her porous figure clearly.
Where the big houses were home and the canal was all I asked
of a river.
The hanging cages of hardware shops,
the songbird at its sallow height.
At the trading hole that peddles hell bank notes and bland
orange cakes. Making her amends with the dead she left hungry
in August.
My body is empty—
watching her lose the faiths
I thought I'd already lost in my childhood all over again—
it drifts like an unloaded barge after desire.
When she turns the corner at the end
of the crosswalk, beyond the invisible
moment called the beginning,
I lose her bare shoulders in the sun.
How bright, that spot of her absence on the curbstone.
Where she's gone, all the bushes are aflame.
Belle Koh Han Lyn founded the writer's group The Saturday Poets in 2022, and her poems have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Eunoia Review. She mainly operates out of her writing-hut on Instagram, @bellehanlyn.
