Bryce Sng: “Nacre”
I am not concentrating enough to hear my breath,
but I grow conscious of the gnawing
lack of cricket calls tonight. Nothing bugs me.
Not even memory and prophecy.
No highschooler frozen nose-deep in a mire
of books, chiding me to change his fate.
No musty corpse nourishing flies in a living room
where the marble tiles pop, pop, and squeak
like the pearl of ice siphoning my warmth
from between my sore hands,
all while the pellucid nacre scurries to
reform it with salt water.
My nerves murmur that they are here
then my bones, my sinews, my throbs of pain.
The pearl throbs along.
Is it disco night within?
There must be. The raving iridescence, the pop and fizz
and clinks, the heady sprays of sweat,
perfume on fabric on skin, the drum and bass stimulating
my heart’s marcato thumping,
harder and faster, like the moment of collapse
after the body overexerts on a run,
the body of ice folding, closing in on itself—
I want to be invited.
I want to be sealed in the moment before closure,
join the crowd dissolving in the cynosure,
coalesce into a treasure worth stringing,
a vine of pearls, succulent and perennial,
yet neither creeping nor ornamental.
But I want to sleep.
But an occupied club never sleeps.
So I keep vigil by this mother-of-pearl
and wait for the clam to demonstrate
the grace of opening up.
When it does, at last, I will wonder
why it chose to be clammed up,
indefinitely, while holding nothing but momentary relief
whose moment has long since passed.
Bryce Sng is a member of the youth literary collective, sploosh! (Instagram: @sploosh_sg), and the writing groups, Caesura (Instagram: @caesura.col) and The Saturday Poets. His works have been published in magazines such as Sekudu Quarterly, sploosh!, and Rainbow Fictioneers' Voyage, as well as the anthologies, A Few Little Words and Fair Tales from Distant Lands.
