catastrophe

mama says to always share good things.


'Stone'
by sleep easy
my talented friend isa, musician and soloist


I often walk into slabs of stone with names and dates.

The other side, a world littered with hazy echoes of ill-mannered exchanges nulled by flowered forked roads.

Some paths ending sooner than I had expected.

I made my way to one of the few dozen paths.

This particular one had a white gate and a long boardwalk that made slight creaks with each step, like expired whispers of conversation and anecdotes.

Spoken like true acquaintances, we weaved and braided memoirs together at the end of the wooden pathway.

Those few condensed pages strung like bracelets and then swallowed.

The pit of my stomach nestles these strung sentences in drawers marked with names and dates.

And from time to time, when specific memories speak, I regurgitate and recite these refrains.

Bringing me back to the end of that pathway. Those echoes cutting through and sinking deep.

Like voices i once knew.


-

'This country to the next'
by ang jing wei
fellow youth writer for the singapore writers festival

(first prize for writingthecity.com competition, July 2012)


one day the boy’s eye took on a milky cast.
frightened, his mother bundled a sack, tied the knot,
put on sturdy clothes and worn out shoes,
and took the boy’s gritty hand.

they set off to see a doctor.
the boy did not know how far. but my
mother, she told me it was forty-
eight kilometres from this county
to the next.

in those days they had to walk, grinding
roads with their feet, pebbles
finding their way
through the miserable soles.

the doctor held the boy’s chin and turned it
this way and that, trying to catch the light in the
ghostly eye. finally, the eye spoke to him.
satisfied, he took a fistful of mottled herbs and
wrapped them in crinkling paper.

they passed through a forest of graves.
the boy took in everything, half clear and half clouded, a
sudden shadow falling on them like a membrane. troubled,
they spun through the trees, unable to find a way out.
on a patch of shady grass they slept.
they awoke to sunlight breaking through in
patches, shining on the grave under their feet. shuddering,
they followed daylight and found their way home.

days later, a strange illness stole away the boy’s mother.

the boy’s father took a new wife. stepmother and
stepson did not get along well, quarrelsome as father and
son. with the woman around, the father always had more to eat, and that
made the boy’s murky eye twitch.

so he gathered his strength of eleven years, found a plot of land,
and plowed the soil. as he stooped over the sun-dipped field
planting shoots of rice, his life was written in the passing cloud,
unseen to him.

five daughter will be born to him,
two sons, not of his flesh.
his eldest daughter will bear a squalling child—
apple red in a december white as his eye.