Muhammad bin Zailan: “Silent Fissures”
Love — or what you first knew of it — arrived as a crack of wood,
in welts that deepened like roots in floodwater. Your body learnt stillness,
the bruises spelling out compliance. The marks swelled,
spreading beneath your ribs: a silent flood that never left.
Shivering under the heavy blanket, fear seeped through fractured seams
like rain in an old house, the damp rising in the walls.
Sometimes, when I lie beside you, your breath rattles like wind straining
against a warped door. I do not knock. I do not enter. I only listen —
wondering if your body ever forgets its own trembling.
The night pools in the bend of your knees, where old bruises bloom
like ink soaking into cloth. I watch the ceiling — cracked, open-mouthed,
as if waiting to confess what even I couldn’t name.
The walls have memorised the shape of your flinching, splintering
like wood that has learnt the shape of a fist.
Muhammad bin Zailan (b. 2008) is a poet and first-year diploma student in Chemical Engineering at Singapore Polytechnic. He serves as Poetry Editor at Youth of Letters, an international youth-led multimedia magazine (www.youthofletters.org), and is currently working on his first chapbook. His poems are forthcoming in PR&TA Journal and AFTERIMAGE's OFTHENOW magazine. When he's not writing, he can usually be found indulging his love for Quadratini wafer biscuits.
