The Tattoo Collector E-Book

Tim Tim Cheng

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 51

Beschreibung

"I moved to a country called writing" declares Tim Tim Cheng in this striking debut collection. The Tattoo Collector explores family history, displacement, politics, protest, and, as it moves between East and West, the uses of language to illustrate and interrogate what lies in between. As these poems range from Hong Kong, Scotland, and London, they unravel the relationship between the body, ecology and class with precise and haunting tenderness. Here, in Cheng's illuminating and needle-sharp poems, the tattoo is a narrative, the body a radical means of expression. In states of flux, between resisting and belonging, we enter museums, hospitals, graveyards, and gigs. These intimate and polyphonic poems invite us to be troubled and enthralled by exhibits and the stories they have to tell, to look inside the glass box and study what is on display. Close-up, the poems bring into the daylight details that can be seen skin-deep on the surface, as well as those which point to another meaning, inked indelibly, beneath.

Leseprobe

The Tattoo Collector

The Tattoo Collector

Tim Tim Cheng

ISBN: 978-1-916760-04-2

eISBN: 978-1-916760-05-9

Copyright © Tim Tim Cheng, 2024.

Cover artwork © Au Wah Yan, 2024.

www.auwahyan.net

All rights reserved. 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.

Tim Tim Cheng has asserted their right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2024 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed on recycled paper in the United Kingdom by Imprint Digital.

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

Question for the Police at Royal Infirmary

I.

The Tattoo Collector

Surgeons’ Hall Museum

Skin. Me.

Sometimes, you are at the wrong party

Master Narratives

The Tattooist

My Bloody Galentines

Girl Ghosts

Jades / 国

Blue Fires

Emergency Regulations Ordinance (1922-)

What do you do with a stone?

Faces and Masks

The Birth of a New Hero

How Memory Works

Reiki

Rudimentary Cantonese

MAJESTY

Death Accents

II.

After Isla

Lantau (Rotten Head)

The Sand I Stand On Is Not My Own

The Tattoo Collector

Deluge

Field Notes

Salt and Rice

Future Perfect

Entrails

瑞龍樓 Shui Lung House

The Tattoo Collector

Florence and the Machine

Yau Teng Daughters

Waterlogged

A Small Book of Distance

III.

Re: Do you feel guilty for not writing in your mother tongue?

The Tattoo Collector

Eczema

Skye-ward

What Have You Thrown Away

Salvaging

The Fo(u)rth Bridge

Hiking, we

Boyfriend for Scale

Silence

Happiness

Muscle Memory

意色樓 An Id Signal

Hidden Agenda

Bad Tattoo Poem

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Questions for the Police at Royal Infirmary

Am I making too much eye contact

Do you always work nights

What will I have for breakfast

Did you know the coffee machine does not work

Should I look at those old ladies’ bruised faces

Are you sick of your job

Why am I looking at you without disgust

Is it because this country is so new to me

Do you think soap operas use the right props for your badges

Did you call the police as a kid

Was it a prank or a threat

What makes you talk: the lack of windows or the colour grey

If you were in the interrogation room, could you tell my great granny lied

Are you kind when no one watches

I.

“A sense of being responsible for a crisis may also give a feeling of control.”

 – Empathy, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (1989)

The Tattoo Collector

Incisions, incisions, incisions –

Gloved fingers stretch my skin for the ink to set.

I’m convinced if I turn my blank slate

into a puzzle, an exhibit, you’ll be looking

and not looking into me, a site for stencilling

future’s blueprints. I’ve practised letting strangers

apply pressure on me. Elbow my shoulders

as they resist the coming of black outlines,

which safeguard every lost charm –

a swallow faces a mountain it can never reach.

Needs to needles. Blessed are the pains

that numb other pains: I kneel on a butterfly

with time’s spiral as wings. Close by, a naked night-

rider gallops the pitch dark. Her eyes glow, hair flies.

Surgeons’ Hall Museum

You are an animal seeking structures

               A structure seeking animals

                              Animals your shattered facts

                                             Shattered facts your animals

Death allows a love too violent for the living

               The living, a violent love of death

                              Violence lets live in the afterlife

                                             The afterlife lets in

Your feet are weak from the silence of saws

               The silence of what you saw

                              A foot snapped, bound heel-shaped

                                             Fissured into rot

You desire some biography

               Some reads bandaged, aged six

                              You are like those who desired her jiggly gait

                                             Named that lotus feet

You name a woman by her suffering

               A woman names you her suffering

                              Which you inherit without knowing

                                             Without her knowing

Skin. Me.

Here a black star that stops smudging was someone’s shoulder, now a waxy bookmark. Here a snake that hisses at its eternal reflection was someone’s chest. Laurel leaves anchor a boat between faded nipples. Hair floats around them in formalin. Here you fantasise about being skinned, hung whole in a glass box. Your thigh, a pantry of food tattoos, cracking with lines of a leather couch: ramen spilling from tumultuous soup, a muscular, blue mushroom, a pomegranate halved next to a grumpy, clothed avocado drinking from a nonic pint. Here you are, of clothes, of skin, of sinews, of bones, of nothing away from other visitors, flipping the big book. Gratitude, in many hands, is incomplete. If you count people in jars too, the hall gets crowded. Here, the more marked you are the easier it is to identify

you.

Sometimes, you are at the wrong party

A note in Cantopop can’t be found in other music.

It’s a girl convincing herself it is what it is.

Friends may forgive you by saying

drinking and travelling are ways

to self-medicate, while you want to punch

and get a refund from everyone

who encourages you to dream bigger.

               A classmate says if I were from your background,

I would not make it here. Another says

everyone should have a three-year plan.

               So every three years, you quit your job,

               rack up student loans, delete your Instagram.

It’s not too late. Let quiet fill your room

with the mothers you were afraid of becoming –

Yours used to visit a pawnshop monthly,

thumbing cash from a raised counter.

When she redeemed her jewellery, she smiled

as if you would never return again.

Master Narratives

In the graveyard, we know not to pick bluebells

but I step on a snail. The sun hushes.

Behind Burton’s sandstone tent of a tomb

is a stair to look in. Glare on scratched glass.

Bones invisibly bedded on two ends.

Isabel burned her husband’s last books,