London, United Kingdom
[Extract taken from corona diary, Wednesday 18 March 2020] Govt announced social isolation on Monday night; it’s got so bad already that I was excited about taking the bins out this morning. Hardly anyone out – about 4 people on the buses 73 and 38 when normally rammed. Mainly only black people – what, going to the most difficult jobs? Little shops are all shut except the coffee shop getting amazing trade from millennials. All the beloved familiar faces I always see on *** road at their perches, gone. The Indian guy in the dry cleaners/clothes mending shop – gone, the shop is shut. The hairdressers are now shut but nail bars open. Taxi drivers looking bereft as is the old Turkish guy in his empty barber shop. People I know are just surviving: jogging, cooking, zooming, drinking wine. God, who will be recovered when all this is over? Will we ever get back to the local bustle when this ends – who will be alive and who dead? Where are all the old people? Are they self-isolating or are more people than we realise ill, at home with the virus and we will never know? Where will we bury our dead? How will the morgues cope with the overflowing bodies and how can we travel and organise funerals when everyone has turned insular and is only protecting their own? The Nextdoor app is both a godsend and terrifying in its parochiality and snooping – the local community recommending where to buy loo roll or Dettol or sniping about who was sunbathing. There is absolutely nowhere to go to except be trapped in this tiny flat with no nature. Anyone now with a house and garden is so lucky. And a car or a big freezer. We are living in mainly one room here and *** (our toddler) is stuck inside. A handsome, young, blond punk guy with tattoos on his eyebrows and piercings – like a latterday Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, is wild outside the newsagents, drinking what looks like vodka, like he doesn’t know where to go now we have to do this social distance. Is lost and alive. This has brought the chaotic people onto the streets. Think the nurseries may shut soon. Anita’s debut poetry pamphlet, Dodo Provocateur, was published by The Rialto in September 2019. She is based in London.
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Singapore
April 16, 2020. 11.50PM Today, my sister will have been in the ICU for four months. No, not like that. Tomorrow she is coming home. Two weeks ago we had a discussion with a palliative doctor and accepted that she may never recover enough to return home. Halfway through this, Prime Minister made a speech announcing not a lockdown but a circuit breaker. Nothing would change except the malls would close or something. Thank fuck. We could still visit her. My family had been at the ICU every day for the past 3.5 months. In the ICU, I put on an episode of This American Life. It’s about a woman whose mother who, like my sister, has ALS, is trapped in a nursing home that she is not allowed to visit. This is not an appropriate distraction. I cry for the woman. I follow her on Twitter. I think, thank fuck I live in Singapore. Two nights later, I am told that under circuit breaker rules the hospital will not allow visitors starting the following morning. We hang around the ICU until 1AM. The past few weeks is the longest I have stayed home and away from the hospital and my sister in what feels like years. Tomorrow, my sister is coming home. It is too dangerous for her to stay. The ICU is filling with patients. Over the past two days, my mother has been in training to administer antibiotics via an IV. I did not know relief could feel this terrifying. Stephanie is a poet, stand up comic and cabaret performer. Their first poetry collection, Roadkill for Beginners, was published by Math Paper Press in 2019. They are currently at home trying to write at least one poem a day while on a 'circuit breaker' in Singapore. New Orleans, USA
1:27 AM on April 15, 2020 All day long we read the news. We read because we are seeking to make sense of this. In the past, reading provided us with answers. The answers arrived fully formed in words written by a person smarter than us. But this time, the smart people don’t know either. The smart people’s articles are helping us not know in better, sharper, clearer ways. The not knowing is becoming so clear we expect to find the answers at the bottom of it soon. And so we read on. Laurel Shimasaki is a JPole (of Japanese and Polish descent). Her work appears in Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. She quarantines in New Orleans. Glasgow, Scotland
翻译/Translation 这是你的语言吗? 这是不是你的嘴巴, 你的牙齿,你的舌头? 你的声音像埋在草地 的种子。你想把它挖出来、 但在光天凝视下, 它 粘着的泥土犹如外套 或者口罩。 ~ Is this your language? Is this or is this not your mouth, your teeth, your tongue? Your sound is like a seed beneath the grass. You want to dig it out, but under the gaze of the sun, dirt clings to it like a coat, or a mask. April Hill is a published British/Chinese lesbian poet based in Glasgow, Scotland. New Jersey, USA
Grey Trench Coat My grey trench coat sits on my clothing rack. Day 30. Dust gathers on its shoulders as it droops down with arms falling to its sides, its frame propped up only by a clothes hanger and the hope that it will be worn again. It is kept company by my other city clothes, but so many of its friends are missing. Some days I wonder how those other coats and sweaters are holding up and if they’re doing alright during these trying and uncertain times. Of course they’re not alright. They are most definitely saddened and depraved of physical touch and affection. But still, nonetheless, abiding by CDC regulations. This saddens me too, for many reasons. Every morning when I wake up, I stare at my clothing rack and deliberate. Maybe, I will wear something besides sweatpants today. The idea tosses itself around in my head, looping in the same sad washer cycle day after day, but I can never get myself to do it. To taint my memories with the mundanities of the present. That would sadden me the most. Instead, I dream of the day when my grey trench coat will once more be draped over my shoulders, its oversized frame dragging behind me as I rush down the subway steps when some stranger will step on the back of my coat again and I will turn around but this time I will not scowl, but smile. Victoria Hu is a writer studying at New York University. A lover of monochromatic grey, she would never be caught dead wearing color. Melbourne, Australia
my sister&I have learned the choreo to Ariana Grande’s ‘Into You’, bonded with Cumi-Kun: our Animal Crossing saviour&icon, attempted to make cheese&rosemary dog cookies— they exploded in the oven, done a creative photoshoot with yellow&pink gerberas, learned to write our Chinese names (陈慧芳 & 陈慧卿), taught our dog Rosa hide&seek, cried alone&together, coloured Isra Seyd’s free activity pages, played as Elf&Human in CHOICES’ Blades book, hyperventilated through La Casa de Papel Parte 4, & napped profusely. &, &, &, the ampersand looks like a pretzel. &, &, &, sanity’s linked to sisterhood. Natasha is a Chinese-Indonesian writer, activist, and dog-mom. Her work can be found on Peril Mag, ABC Life, Local Wolves, & EWF 2019. Sydney, Australia
On [Easter] Sunday I reflected on all the false temples — yoga studios, law firms, Instagram, marriage — I drafted, then abandoned the poem on this. I can’t panic because patterns are technically soothing and predictable. Mine is to abandon then return. Our lives are governed by this rhythm, consider the Sun, forever appearing then abandoning then returning again. Diary of a Rhythm: · Return to the nightly ritual of smoking yourself into Indica stupor, Mango Weiss bars & HD millennial content: Hulu’s Sad Hot Girls — a technocratic roulette of (mostly) white femmes showcasing their neurosis & romantic privilege. Pass out and rise with a sore throat & wounded tolerance. · Abandon and swear off streaming & smoking until you can source some mullein and lavender (herbs for lungs). · Return to morning rituals of mool mantra, books & working out. Only Zoom other darlings of colour like T and I with whom you fawn over Cathy Hong’s essays, design revolutions & be loud with your adoration of one another’s static-ridden bedhead lewks. · Abandon Twitter & attempts at connecting with well-meaning white friends after suffering temporary hearing loss from the ring of the words “melanin” & “absorption of Vitamin D” in response to you mentioning the alarming rate of black people contracting COVID-19. (What is the meaning of well-meaning?) · Return to your fading mother’s lap, nurse her cheeks & wonder about your lion-love in LA — another Sun you orbit — wonder whether romantic bond can substitute maternal love. How the long-distance trains you both for fruition in absentia. · Abandon thoughts of cancer, visas & funeral restrictions; crave simplicity and resign to the familiar velvet of Indica haze & “Trick Mirror” (thank you, Jia) amusement; perhaps High Fidelity is a better distraction tonight. Perhaps you’ll be alive enough to touch yourself before midnight. Kiran Bath is a poet from Brooklyn by way of Sydney. She has received fellowships and support from Poets House, Kundiman and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work appears in wildness, The Adroit Journal, Lunch Ticket and the ever elusive ‘elsewhere’. Inner Mongolia, China regina is a queer trans nonbinary twenty-something in the midst of figuring out how to heal their inner child. if you have some tips, please let them know at [email protected] ~
New York, USA
The morning is dry but there’s plenty to do. I start by sticking a finger in the pink mold in the shower. I hum and let it enter under my fingernail. Now we are one! Now I am whole! Do not believe me though I am unforgivable. I pick up every slate of sun in the house and put them away, to punish them. Every cloud I see I think: you are so horrible! People are dying. The night is small-minded but there’s plenty to do. I scrape the day into the plastic bag by the sink: we must do it again soon. Kathleen Ma lives in Queens, NY, where she works as a labor researcher. New York, USA
I dream about L almost every night. It’s been months since we last spoke, long before the isolation began. He comes to me in different forms: as a high school boy kissing me on the lawn of a long backyard. As a dog wrapping its hind legs around me. I want to ask him if she fucks him as well as I do, if he ever claims to know her. The claims he once laid on me. My white friend T posts a video urging Americans to participate in the census. She writes in the comments “& I am talking mostly to my white friends bc my friends of color know better than I ever will (obviously) what it’s like to be both profited off and abandoned by the state.” It is the use of the word “obviously” that irks me the most. In the video she looks lethargic, reciting a string of words with no real affect, an improvised performance done badly. Later in the text, “oh, but I am so sleepy now, I’m going off to stretch,” because advocating for black and brown people exhausts her so much that she now has to do yoga to recuperate. My therapist asks, “When will you stop measuring yourself by a rubric that will never accept you?” I want to ask in return, “When and where will I recuperate?” I read in a book that stays open on my desk that gossip—the very act of thinking, speaking and writing about another person—constitutes a way of paying attention (another form of love). If that is the case, I want every man to speak my name on his lips. To remember me, like this. Jen Lue is a Kundiman fellow and a 2018-19 Margins Fellow at Asian American Writers' Workshop. She lives and works in New York, NY. |
STAY HOME DIARYan online archive of diary entries by Asian artists and writers, recording our lives from March to April 2020. |