[Missing]
In 1942, under Operation Sook Ching, men were corralled and interrogated, notably in Chinatown,and taken away by the truckload to remote areas, such as Changi, Bedok, and Punggol, where their lives were ended by a firing squad.
I think this is the way
of missing you
Much in the way of
missing you
How hungry the stomach
milked to its root
The evening stilled
into what it has forgotten
How are you before you were
& you were you were
before the and
The words that had eluded us for so long
so long
Became
the lonely island
I’d forged from a memory
The face on the mantle speaks with
Such sad eyes
Such sad I’s
Like I was once a rickshaw driver but.
Some lots were stones.
Some suns never set
The long shadows cast
into the cell when they came
Incense curling a fist
through the window
And I still remember
the gun that came around,
The moths caught in my throat,
And you left through the back
Not in front of them please
Those damn buts.
Squared off by the bullet
into a sky that feels like an eternity No
one could have
I think you thought that
Some time on that long drive
Into eternity
If only there was something we could destroy
That night in Babel
If only it hurts much as the giving
And morning glory,
you welcome the day after
The carnival of flies.
Only the left behind knows
what was left behind.
Pa, such is the missing.
Such is the missing in the part of me missing
and missing you.
A Canon of Constraints
Consecration Take these hands and use it
for another purpose, this
Country has another name we have
mispronounced into a
Curse We carry scars
that we keep picking into
Cicatrices Where we are circling a moot point
like a hawk with a clover in its
Claws I know they are called talons but after the
war, is our existence not a misnomer? We call
Crooks The ones who burnt the mama shops
to the ground, not the
Colonial Rule that ran
that night on the
Concrete Bridge,
they made
Crucibles From our jars of clay
in the middle of a
Century When they are moving
but we are still in
Calamity The many times we have stemmed the
blood with mugwort leaves, sleeping in
Candle-light The firecrackers
sound without
Celebration Someone tells you
thank God you’ve survived
Carnations Line the streets,
beneath the wind’s
Caress Gentle, like
Caros the way my grandma says my father is
only sleeping, the same way you’d say
Cerulean Like forgiveness,
only lighter
Carnage Even in the courts, they will deny these
monsters they’ve made.
Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a Tin House 2024 Winter Workshop participant. She has work published/forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, OSU The Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is published with Cathexis Northwest Press and second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is published with Mouthfeel Press. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com
BACK TO ISSUE