Tapping At Glass E-Book

Tim Tim Cheng

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 37

Beschreibung

Tapping At Glass charts girlhood, multilingualism, and psychogeography from Hong Kong to Scotland. Myths, meditations on the arts and mass media, and migration stories entwine. Through protest-stricken urban spaces, love hotels, farming as activism, frog watching, alternative therapies, and seascapes where racial and social memories flow in all directions, the working class subjects in Cheng's poems reflect on what it means to exist in one locale and dream of elsewhere, where the past and future, interconnectedness and othering, are in perpetual negotiation. Tapping into various moods, Cheng's poems question the making of a self and a city, and the languages one uses to translate microhistories. Tapping At Glass is Tim Tim's debut pamphlet collection. "Tim Tim Cheng is a wonderful new voice in the poetry landscape. Playful, serious, complicating any attempt to pin her down – even in the short span of a pamphlet she dances through images and ideas. Already so accomplished, she is definitely a poet who is going places." – Niall Campbell

Leseprobe

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2023 Tim Tim Cheng

The right of Tim Tim Cheng to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED FEB 2023

Printed and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-29-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-77-7

CONTENTS

Bathtub

Like the Earth, I Become Hotter and Hotter

Icarus, a girl, talks to interviewers

Beds

SHE WILL

Boyfriend for Scale

Beginner’s Wall, Shek O

Clouds and Clouds

Shockproof

Topography

How Memory Works

Reiki

News, Nocturnal

Since Marina and Grace brought me white roses,

NOTES TO IMPOSSIBILITY

Field Notes

Salt and Rice

Boxed in

(H)ours

In and Out

The Tattooist

Froggos, froggone

Waterlogged

intertidal

Horrible Kids

How do you spell [         ] in Chinese

Ars Poetica with Translations

NO LANGUAGE

Self-Portrait of My Granny in the Voice of Anti-Japanese Drama’s Protagonists

Kindergarten

Sonnets with Skylines

Notes & Acknowledgements

Tapping

At Glass

Bathtub

The most pressing question today

is why your head

fits right onto my shoulder.

The rest is soap! soap! soap!

Like the earth, I become hotter and hotter.

(I starfished in your bed last night, you said.)

Have you seen one of those square starfish?

They look like a fucking wallet!

What’s star-shaped anyway?

You can’t outline explosions, can you?

(I pushed you out of bed, you said.)

Sounds like your problem.

Icarus, a girl, talks to interviewers

after The New York Times’ feature on the second Chinese female astronaut

You asked if I was afraid of the sun

melting my eye makeup.

I had waxed enough to know beauty burned

and some places were better left

untouched—questions, like ingrown hairs,

trapped under the skin in the wrong direction.

My father named me after my brother

but never made me wings, not wanting

to admit to his own misjudgement:

I did listen, and I flew better—oh the solitude

I had, not being father’s favourite son,

too loud, had Chang’e not been writing back.

The sun was too bright for my taste.

I packed my makeup (but not sanitary products)

and waited for the moon to wax,

its murmur tickling my nape. Of Chang’e’s

many stories, I knew she drank

her husband’s elixir to fly to the moon

just to escape the celebration sex

after he shot down those nine damned suns.

You thought she was running away

from domesticity. Did you ask her husband

to water their osmanthus tree,

or if eyeliners helped him aim better?

No. So why did you act shocked

as I ascended? Accuse Chang’e and I

for deviance. We no longer need

the safety of your approval. Now:

my skirt, opening upwards;

my breasts, anti-gravitational;

the stars; the glitter on my eyes,

free from your orbitary gaze. On a lucky day,

when the moon is red from the beads

floating around me, some of which

spatter in your face, you’ll know

I’ve shed your ill-fitting space suit.

Beds

after Fili Papinho’s flower embroidery

My back and mattress form an inexact line,

a horizon refusing light. I turn for my peace lilies.

In half-shade, their lush, glossy green

slouches like silence.

                            They may as well wilt for the thought of wetness,

rising as soon as I water them again, arriving home

from a one-night stand, forever distracted

by others’ arrhythmical plants.

                                                         Call this feeling seasonal—

what controls me makes me too—black threads

tie my limbs to a false lily’s flowers, stitching me

into its wide white spathe.

                                          I am in my underwear.

My legs, lopsided hills. Way-laid, I look away

from the lily’s damp softness. Its rim singes,

a stillness ringing

                              I will, I will, I will—

just not now: the lilies in my room are curling in,

shrouding their sexes. I have not killed them, have I—

I behead them to return them to soil.

                                                        Where water passes,

a darker shade over their veined papery grasp.

SHE WILL

after the film Shell (2012) by Scott Graham

A car crash is just touching

too much—the father

scurries into the headlight

like the roadkill he butchers, the meat

his daughter cooks reluctantly.

Shock is when you eat

and bite into the membrane