I always wonder when you will expire. walls
melding into scaffolding, trading tangerine for
ice rinks and navigation night-
mares of northpoint proportion.
often you don’t need to speak.
you’re good at letting the route
do the talking. look, it seems
to say, no matter what happens
the sun still spills its yolk
into the sea
I gazed myself in
her, remembered:
this body already
a technē receded
past its present
from its future
Hypothesis: the body inescapable once perceived.
Remove pronoun and the body lies still. Hypo-thesis
implying under, as in foundation of body of work, at remove.
As in corpus. I did not want to write about the body.
Family: Okay signs with both hands. Wrap the tip of the thumbs with the indexes, protect them from harm. Form the space to keep them enclosed.
Read MoreChope is a verb is an action is a signal is a warning is a territory marker indicating that the table belongs to someone owning tissue pack.
Read Morei imagine you, mapped onto signals, unravelling
distances through undersea cables; only to fall
short of plexiglass. moving light, rendered
sans warmth, on my display.
so the blinds, the kind that keep the sun out,
the kind that keep our eyes shut, the latter fold,
that’s what you do with a losing hand, that’s what
i do with laundry before the rain resets its wet,
the former draw, from where i get art
It really doesn’t matter how smart or talented you are. If you can’t be on time, won’t learn your lines, are mean to the crew, and are self-centred, believe me, it shows in your work. I’ve had to speak to 2 different young actresses about their behaviour – one made an effort to change, the other hasn’t had work in theatre since. Not because of me, I don’t have that kind of clout, but simply because she had the personality of a cockroach.
Read MoreThe word ‘archive’ is not one that people would usually connotate with fun. Perhaps the first association that might come to mind are the various functions to archive posts and messages on Instagram and Whatsapp. Material that people feel are no longer relevant to them now and best deemed as a relic of the past. A more traditional association might be the idea of the archive as a musty collection locked in a basement somewhere, perhaps something like the Vatican Secret Archive. In both cases, the archive is a place with limited access to artefacts that are not really particularly relevant to our day and age.
Read MoreIn 2018, ila and Sonia Kwek embarked on a spontaneous collaboration for an open call by Rebel Daughters in 2018, as part of International Women’s Day with the aim of “filling up the public sphere, physical and virtual, with works of art done by female creatives from or based in the region”. Using red thread as a departure point, a metaphor for predestined connections for kindred spirits to find each other through different lifetimes. Over the years, both ila and Sonia have collaborated in three different iterations of this project, examining the politics of the body in society. Through email exchanges, they ruminate their experiences in working collaboratively and the kinship that has blossomed and grown over the years.
Read MoreAh yes, here we are, the political issue.
The illustrious repertoire of a literary outfit is never truly complete without an edition that wrangles with the reasons why we write what we write.
Read MoreWhen I was asked to curate this issue of SingPoWriMo, there was a furore over Elizabeth Haigh’s “Singaporean” cookbook Makan, and how it had plagiarised not just recipes, but personal memories, from an earlier cookbook, Growing up in a Nonya Kitchen, by the Singaporean author Sharon Wee.
Read MoreSomeone in my mushroom group has shared a video about cicadas
whose bodies have been eaten away by a fungus which keeps their
brains intact and the result is a video of a hollow, half eaten cicada
with no internal organs walking across a forest floor. There is a hell
of a lazy metaphor here but I will not take the bait. Not today.
Miguel, are you surprised in Spanish? You are
Languaged as threads
Of genetic letters and entry letters
Treading across the Atlantic, across
Generations of Miguels
Within the margins of this one-sided page,
I contort myself beyond bended knee.
All that I am boiled and stripped to the bone
for a bridge between now and a future
where interests converge, where we both wait:
you for able hands, and I on ones that feed.
The one the bungalow tai tais want to speak with.
The one who stress-tests the cookies behind counters,
conducts quality checks with a ruler and some stolen crumbs.
Measuring each logo, ordering gloss for copy.
You say that cheese placement was just too sloppy.
To say they’re paid peanuts is to overstate crumbs.
Counter each plea with I’m sorry, these are hard times
for us all. Cut the width of a life in six inches.
“After that bird slept for half a day, it woke determined to truly live.”
When the bird arose, his gaze turned towards the forest. A patchwork of emerald, gold and ebony embellished the grey heavens. He looked on dreamily, enthralled by the sight. There he stood rooted, lost in the moment.
Read MoreCW: Body issues, self-harm
it starts/
the body undressed/
staring/small nose/fat
ass/small ass/staring/boys
don’t stare/with you/at you/
you’re pretty when you smile/
I never wanted to be noun. I could be
all sorts of verbs. Not -er
but thing-which: the thingness
contingent, happenstance. To be
the happening, a friendly gerund
around only as long as needed.