Victoria, Canada ALHS (ig: @muchamoaboutnothing) is the writer of the Poemgranates newsletter. Her poetry has appeared in Thistle Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review and Cerurove.
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Oxford, United Kingdom Minying Huang (@minyingh) grew up in Cambridge, UK. Her work appears in PANK Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
London, United Kingdom
I woke up refreshed this morning, after getting over seven hours of sleep. My toddler crashed early last night - I was trying to listen to a reading event on FB Live when I heard her cry, so I dropped the event and ran down to find her naked, asleep in her papa’s arms. He was gently pacing around our kitchen carrying her. That was exactly 8pm, as the neighbourhood were out on their doorsteps clapping for the NHS. We said our thanks quietly, as we put our daughter to bed, dressing her while she slept. And slept, she did… until nearly 8am this morning. I woke up energised this morning, after a productive evening of work, editing a collection of stories that will be published in a new annual anthology. This anthology has been brewing for the last three years… life got in the way, but I’m excited that the first issue will be in the year 2020. I love even numbers and patterns. I woke up grateful this morning, after two full weeks of being isolated at home, just the three of us, knowing that we’re well and safe. And that our efforts have worked and will continue to work… that while we keep ourselves safe, we’re keeping others safe too. I woke up this morning. 🙏 Yen Ooi is a writer, editor, and researcher who loves deconstructing and reconstructing life through stories. Twitter: @yenooi New York, USA
I want to clarify: When I say I’m sorry this is happening-- When I say I’m sorry this is happening I am saying I’m sorry this is happening to us It is a catch-all for transmitting a feeling Announcing My insides are knotted, weight, sinking, dragging across the ocean floor; I wanted to know if yours are, too. I want to tell you that for me this season began in death. It waded in a pool of grief, was prefaced by a hospitalization and unraveled in nine days, under the gentle shower of joss paper and the absurdism of a mad-libbed eulogy; I was committing to memory: what it means to share in loss 2,887 CASES how a house settles into emptiness FLIGHTS CANCELLED how your aunt’s voice drops to a whisper 武汉,黄冈,鄂州 ON LOCKDOWN what it feels like to find in a cemetery the granite headstone of a child. Here is grief, derailed by a national epidemic. Here is grief, accompanied by a panicked departure, foul 13-hour-flight breath, friends who don’t know what to say, an airport TV telling me Kobe died, a red-eye that leaves me dry and sad and silent. Weeks pass. You see-- I wanted to give grief tenderness I wanted to do it justice, to be able to say the impossible, selfish thing that what I gave grief in time and energy made the death itself easy, warranted that my grandmother didn’t die in the winter for no reason But grief is elusive, hard to get ahold of, greedy and mute What do you say to grief when it does not speak to you? So I have said nothing and in that time, the great, wide ocean between us has only lengthened, deepened in silence. Silence is the thing I wish I had not inherited. No—I wish that I spoke to grief when it came to me that I laid out its heavy, misshapen souvenirs across my bedroom floor when my bedroom floor was still my bedroom floor when it was not an island, or a piece of driftwood, or a slab of seabed; I wish that I had given it my best shot, if only to prepare for what weight feels like. This season began in death, is growing exponentially in death. Every day I wake and find that I am mourning, find that I did not know grief could cling to brick walls or soak the hardwood floors or swallow our lives whole, that it could leave the thick stench of disinfectant, even if I open all the windows. I also did not know that flowers could still bloom, in grief, and that could be good but it feels bad. So, I’m sorry this is happening. I’m sorry to be crude, like a child, and I’m sorry if the poetry does not surface today; The end of mourning has not come for weeks, will not come for many more, since for grief to listen, there must be space there must be the wide green grass we are free to roam on, and a buoy. I have gone back and counted one by one, all the things I have and could not, for the life of me, find either. Denise Zhou (@dyzhou on Instagram) is a CA-raised, NYC-based filmmaker and writer. www.denisezhou.com Honolulu, USA Kyla Smith (@kyla.aiko) is a writer, illustrator, and comic artist. She's working on perfecting her hand-pulled noodle technique. Sydney, Australia
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how often I say the word truly. As in, truly, I mean it, believe me. “Truly,” I text Emma on Tuesday night. “I think Taylor Swift is a great songwriter.” I haven’t written poetry for four months, and though I know this isn’t the time to be searching for beauty, I still miss it. I used to think everything in the world could make me feel something, but now I look at the light coming in from the window, and I don’t want to turn it into anything. I think all poems are just that – the turning-of-things, the stitching. The other day I got an email about a poetry submission I’d forgotten about. I sent it in two months ago, and its arrival was a pleasant surprise. The poem, written for a Creative Writing class late last year, was about a night time train ride and my own loneliness. In his letter, the editor wrote: Sincerely, it’s wonderful. He probably sends the same email to everyone, but something about the word Sincerely still tugs at my heart. It feels like the grown-up version of my childish Truly!, which always sounds like it should be followed by an exclamation point. It’s a habit and a sentiment of mine, to want so desperately to be believed. My mum thinks the way I say, “do you know what I mean?” is condescending, but how else will I know. How else are we supposed to say things, except sincerely, truly, the way it really means, hoping maybe someone else can feel it too. Donnalyn Xu is a Filipino-Chinese writer, poet, and sometimes-artist from Sydney. She is a Libra sun/moon/venus, which means that everything she writes is a love poem in some way. California, USA
It starts with a tingling, a humming sensation that begins in the upper left quadrant of my chest, near my heart. When the nurse answers the phone, she says that there’s nothing wrong, no symptoms, no history of trauma and no lesions, no means of identification that could possibly mean something. I try to relax, but the pulsing – heartbeat – feels like it can’t contain itself. The nurse is still speaking, saying that I should eat more vitamins and exercise, but I interrupt her. “Is it going to be permanent?” The nurse pauses, as if thinking. “No. Or at least, I don’t think so. It’s probably just anxiety.” I can go back to my baseline again, I think. It strikes me that I’ve always been afraid of change, always been afraid of emptiness and suddenly not having the people that I’m with. But now, I’m afraid of permanence. I’m afraid that when I wake up, I’ll still be trapped, disconnected from the world. But what I’m most afraid of is being static, existing in a state of being but not really knowing or understanding what it means. Valerie Wu is a student, artist, and writer. Her essay collection Studies in Translation (2018) focuses on the language of diasporic identity. Massachusetts, USA
The sweat scent of your body, Warm, acrid, sweet Underneath my body My nose seeking the deepest and softest corners To rest I settle like an ooze Slowly sinking While your fingers tap little journeys on my shoulders And little questions on my knee And I cradle your kneecaps in my warm palms Our bodies wound Limbs twined I like my body, When it is with your body. When every breath is of you. And I see only Your shut eyelids, sweet lashes Sly smile A nose that catches itself On my lips As we roll in waves across the bed I hold the wingspan of your ribs Expanding, contracting, alive As you reach into mine And hook my heart And wrench it Smiling as you do it Because you like me You have a crush on me But you can’t be with me I lay my head on your belly soft And listen to the little conversations of your gut I look into your flecked eyes And you’re a sun Hair a whipped halo “Hair isn’t meant to be neat,” you say Your shed clothes aren’t neat When you dump them on the floor, Carelessly (Though I would’ve liked to care for them) The knit rainbow cap and strawberry sweater Necklace like a piece of Mars Wispy brown hairs that I find later. The shed feathers of a California duck That nested in my room for a brief week. Lillian Fok is a Chinese American student, dancer, cyclist at Smith College. They call Staten Island, New York home. Wisconsin, USA
Love Poem During an Apocalypse but what bad things will happen to us than that which has not happened already? We have ambled before through this stale routine: another world ending by forces disobedient, by hands which are not ours. We have memorized the shorter highways in preparation for the loud unearthing. Where will we be found amidst the glacier -slow atrophy of the sun? When our only bodies become separated by tremors of bad news? When this small earth performs its last pirouette, weeps goodbye at once to its moon, yours is the palm on which my fingers would like to disappear, the last safe pasture in sight John Paul Martinez is a Filipino Canadian poet writing out of the Midwest. He is interested in nature, language acquisition, and cinematography. He lives with his two marimo moss balls, Noun & Verb. [@jpmpoet] Kolkata, India I was supposed to surprise my best friend on her birthday by travelling all over to her city (Hyderabad) next week. Instead, I'm spending my days alternatively whining, sleeping, doodling and weeping over my unwritten dissertation.
Ahona Das is a final year postgraduate student from India, studying English literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Instagram: @lil.miss.doodles |
STAY HOME DIARYan online archive of diary entries by Asian artists and writers, recording our lives from March to April 2020. |