But you’re still
facing me in that gallery.
Green paint
jogging down your face,
& I laughed
like a goat. The street
is crowded on the outside
& the sidewalks
are lonely. I have
been eating fly eggs
on apples tasting
like socks since that dinner
with talk of errands
on the table. & lives
yet to live. & the friends
dragging us
everywhere. Which means
I have been swallowing
puddles & puddles
of picnics with four
dudes sitting under
the pink sky. Guess what,
you were right. Always
ready to chop
my hand off, for whatever.
We’re back
in the bear trap, baby.
Somebody had warned me
& I didn’t listen.
There were frescoes beside
the love-locks in Paris. Forged
abandonment when
the woman spelled out
whatever. I didn’t know. I was
a person belittled
by what I lost. Feeble
fists out to fight
the megaphone
yelling entropy
I was passing by
a park bench. Birds
& birds with their obstetrical
beaks. & I didn’t know what made
the corgis & his
dalmatian wife bark
so loudly, but they knew
they had to. There was hotness
seeping down my sleeves,
like honey-lipped
lake water. Again,
again I’m back in that forever
path towards a decade
when the grief of a place
got compressed or cultivated
into presence. They don’t
believe me when I say
I’m bereaved of something
you can’t carve
onto a log when
you feel like it, & it isn’t
sold in those spray-paint
cans kissing back allies. Met you,
Oh I possibly met you
back there, or in
the toilet smelling of
diesel parked beside
an eatery, where you work
scrambling ham & cracking
open fire escapes so
the dying lady finally has it all
tucked into her. I’m thinking
about mom in limelight &
dead uncles. How
we live days never
knowing when it’s the freeway
or parking. I swear I wrote down
on the distorted pedal
I’d do it someday. I’d
tell you someday. Come by,
go past. Just passing by
Aneska Tan is a student from Singapore who likes to write when she is not fighting her way through academia. Her work appears in Rust + Moth, and Lunch Ticket, and petrichor, among other journals. In the after hours you’ll usually find her wallowing in her inability to leave the house. WEB
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