Shaun Loh

Five Poems

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adam 

 

The sixth day — 

we traced our bodies back 

to the birth of civilisation, 

where man and man, raw and unadulterated, 

inhaled innocence out of the tepid air. 

 

You were fresh in aftershave, doe-eyed 

at the apple on my neck. Harbouring 

a belabored genesis over our backs, 

we hastened to poke each other’s ribs, 

sense semblance of concrete amidst our quake. 

 

Round this neck of my woods your inveigled lips 

swathed, tangenting, ensuring never to triturate 

the poison deep in. Have the cake, don’t eat it. 

But soon the rush cascading from me to you 

prompted you to yield. You took a bite.

 

autopsy guy 

 

That same noon I got murdered, I could hear 

your tiresome disdain towards your dumb intern: 

how the Acid Phosphatase Test must be immediate 

to check for semen, how blood spatter must be 

analysed in millimetre exactitude, not a 

dismissive passive/aggressive dichotomy, 

how the configuration of hickeys round my neck 

should be sympathised with struggle and strangulation. 

 

Did you not laugh at that modelling show 

for making “skinny bitches” pose as victims? 

Didn’t you ask me how those girls and 

Tyra Banks could rob the dignity of death 

for the sake of glamor? Why am I still here, 

my only immortal organs my palpable glare at you, 

my earshot of your eternally annoying voice? 

Can you stop babbling to your intern and just 

 

shove me in some tent? The tiles, they are sharp. 

I had hoped you could see from my dead eyes that 

I wanted you to touch my body — not Mariah Carey 

style — just feel how he made my veins so stale, 

teguments pale. Contaminate my crime scene 

and me with your unprotected curious fists. 

Solicit our spectres through mutual contact. 

Sense the rush of your perversion and acknowledge it. 

 

tahamina / janis ian 

 

Disheveled low pony because an Ariana one hurt. 

Eyes bald, though smoky with caffeine-sedated circles. 

“You’re not like the other girls,” I muttered by your ear, 

and we gagged, cos we sounded like that couple. 

 

Recess warranted our perpetual rendezvous, but not 

that clandestine. No one really cared about us anyway. 

Cavorting with self-deprecation we arrowed our flaws. 

You the fat girl no boy wanted, I that faggot. 

 

One day the geeks will inherit the earth, you declared. 

My manicured pinky entangled with yours. A boy who 

celebrated Barbie and a girl, who unrequitedly loved her. 

Built a fortress of a dollhouse, alone against the world.

 

formosa* 

 

Elide all histories; this will be it. 

This moment, fugacious as Formosa, 

binds our fourth fingers with tight fake cartier. 

The sketchy justice of peace, from some  

aboriginal suburb, yaks in alien dialect. 

Our lips touch though he hasn’t said so. 

Finally us, two cliched halves, forming 

into one in Formosa, alone with 

an ordained shaman-like man. 

 

Did the Chinese 

ever ideate it coming to this? 

Or the Japs? Treaty of Shimonoseki 

had it in fine print probably: fair share of 

the sacred splice land can come, 

but only a century later. So this is it, isn’t it? 

Ethereal as it is ephemeral: Formosa. 

Yet you remind me on the Hello Kitty flight back: 

hide this heathen history in our hearts forever. 

* ~ Formosa, modern-day Taiwan, was declared to resist its cessation to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. This was after the Japs defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War. Nonetheless, it collapsed after only five months, and became fully occupied by Japan. Fast forward to 2017, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalise gay marriage.

 

chia seed 

 

So black 

and they surge through the inertia of air 

around his fat fingers, then 

dribble into his water bottles 

 

and the water. He shakes it, never stirs. 

Flowing like a carousel of mythical mammals 

they soon unearth the way to float, 

how to live under his thumb. 

 

They discharge something white, something trite, 

but with their black bodies it feels just right. 

Always hard and dark when glued onto his fingers, 

yet diaphanously elegiac in his sticky mouth. 

 

Shaun Loh is a poet based in Singapore. His poetry has previously been published in Amber Poetry and An Atelier of Healing: Poetry about Trauma and Recovery. 

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