Loh Guan Liang

May 3, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Loh Guan Liang teaches in Singapore. His poems have appeared on Ceriph, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, twntysmthg, and Moving Words 2011: A Poetry Anthology. Winner of Moving Words 2011, Guan Liang is working on his first chapbook of poems, Words Apart.

One Look

One look is all it takes for the Uncle to know what I want. Almost as if the shape of my head tells him stories about myself I barely even know, the layers of which he shaves away stroke by stroke. He never asks for my name; likewise I’ve always known him as Uncle.

Sitting there with a cloth round my neck like an oversized bib the customary how would you like your hair cut muttered in Mandarin doesn’t materialise.

Taken by surprise – by the absence of a verbal something prior the dance of steel and flesh.

Throughout the entire session we ask of each other in silences punctuated by his Hokkien exchanges with other uncles. Tales of tepid kopi-oh; pumpkin cakes and glutinous rice at Si Beh Lor; smoking zones at 口福 (the one near my house, not here stupid). I think of falling snow, mechanical droning mirrored to infinity, and practised fingers sculpting dark mysteries on my head.

Si Beh Lor: Waterloo Street, Singapore

口福: Koufu, a local food-court chain in Singapore.

Aviary
(or Canberra Secondary School)

1. Birds of a Feather

Pointy comb in hand, she pecks at her hair. Out comes a flock of clips dark as night, like blackbirds out of their nest. And in one swift motion they return to the fold, never to be seen again. She sleeps her well-maintained sleep.

2. Bird-watching

The boys cry out across the block, Little bird, little bird, can you hear me? Little bird, little bird, can you see me?

The girl laughs a wordless whisper. Yes I can, but you’re in your cage with the painted boredom & plastic apathy; and the bell hasn’t set you free yet. Better luck next time, little birds.

Jerrold Yam

May 3, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Having recently completed National Service in Singapore, Jerrold will be pursuing undergraduate Law at University College London in September 2012. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ceriph, Moving Words 2011: A Poetry Anthology, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow, Symbal, the Singapore Memory Project and The Substation Love Letters Project. His debut book of poetry will be released in early 2012.

Inheritance

Walking the car after dinner, hands
unhinged in confidence or the veined
clasp of its insecurity, my parents
spot things they don’t recognise—
hair salons, shophouses, bakeries
bleached in French décor to make
them question if we’ve been living
in the area for twenty years. I trace
their eyes back to the invincibility
of provision shops, when sunsets
clot traffic to a trickle and old men
play chess in silhouettes conjured
by flats they can finally claim
a part of. I believe happiness, this
strange liability perching on tongues.
I imagine her head nestled like an
oath on his shoulder, the hollow
in their hands warming to build a
life together. One of them already
dreams of taking me to dinner, for
me to command the hollow welded
with their palms. They are helpless
in youth, carving all possibilities
out for that wisp of a heartbeat
still blinded by its own miracle.

Commencement

All this hunger I will never know
is stranded in the script of words
between your father, and
your helpless, adolescent self—
the way children hide in their hands
a bounty of last snow, not realising
the warmth bodies surrender is
also decay. I imagine your neck
arched over papers, arms ready to
flee at the rehearsed moment.
The television splutters its share
of complacent dreams. Your father
swerves into you, doused in a day’s
liturgy of sweat and beer, blares
apart the radio, cursing his wife
for believing education. He hates
the determined curve of your neck,
oil whispering in a cracked lamp,
the audacity of paper choking
his table like guilt. In many ways
I thank him. He alone is responsible
for my happiness. Had he not flung
books off the ledge each night, pages
mingling with the flat’s vocabulary
of unlit rooms like echoes
in Icarian faith—you will not be here
today, your fingertips perched
on my mortarboard, correcting each
tilt like wayward names we agree
to acknowledge, then call our own.

Visitor

Each morning the neighbour fastens his tie
before driving off, and from your bed
you see gates swinging in step
like that pendant of yours, now culled
from vantage and invisible
in its hollow, mahogany drawer. Light
gathers at the window’s edge, too early
for letting itself in, and the news
arrives by phone, circling like crows, always
a nuisance, news freshly perched
in twin sanctums of your ears, your
eyes trespassing on the neighbour’s yard.
The father of your children is dead, it says,
some ten minutes ago, when curtains still guard
and you have not risen. A wind
ripples through trees, maybe it is finding its way
among distractions, a voice you hear but
cannot see. By the fence, dew on eager leaves
ripening as it disappears, a trade
made necessary by those too long in love, or what
makes love vulnerable, this neck of skin, this
aching after hiding places—your pendant
unclasped, pushed away, or let
go, heard not seen.

Kathleen Hellen

May 3, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Cimarron Review; Frogpond; Hawai’i Review; Japanophile; Kartika Review; Lantern Review; Mythium; Natural Bridge; Nimrod; Pirene’s Fountain; Platte Valley Review; Poetry International; Prairie Schooner; Southern California Review; and Witness, among others; and on WYPR’s “The Signal.” She is senior editor for The Baltimore Review.

In this earthly garden

jay is sometimes hawk
sometimes rusty pump

calling. I am trying to find you

in that hide and seek we do
in which we both are hiding
You, sometimes haughty,
sometimes in your hiddenness, aloof

sometimes scolding. You—
an attitude, like that bobbing thing uh-huh
the lilies do. Like the leaves of
the dracaena waving see-you-later, baby

I was stupid over you
A croton clowning
changing colors up my sleeve to please
the winds in you. I was red I was blue,
hiding my true nature.

I was wandering jew. Trailing
stem and patient as grass
A shadow on the sun-dial of your
bright location

if only I had asked, even if doubtful
Come out, come out

Who, Me?

Not in white paste flecked with lead
but equally geisha. The wearer’s death

pretending to be flesh. A mask
for the kabuki, affected for the theater

of sorrows. Several husbands gone, fewer friends.
Even children, groomed to never know me,
if they ever knew the nature I repair—

spotted, lined with care— they wouldn’t recognize me.
None have ever penetrated to the skin the nape surrenders 

in the rare accident of costume. A cover-up
judged as the foundation to a bare existence.
Base, yes. The essence

of the image of myself reflected in this dressing
room of mirrors. A triptych of pretense
Of concealments

The winter perfume of a doubt

Nanking is my mother

In self, those who are alive and dead
—from the Chandogya Upanishad

What does she want?
A daughter
to her back
that furious hump?

Pointing to her lips
without the saying
Whisper of a foreign tongue

Cane that coughs a thumping
Should I offer?
On a sidewalk on a street
near the Medicine Shop

She shoves a crumpled dollar
for the trouble that she is
or she is not. The sun 

purpling hot
The bus the bus about to stop

A.K. Kulshreshth

May 2, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

A.K. Kulshreshth has had stories published in two anthologies of new writing (Bear Fruit, Singapore, 2009 and Silverfish 4, Kuala Lumpur, 2003) and in Muse India. Another story is forthcoming in Asia Literary Review. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Engineering and a Ph.D. in Management.

Innocence

He lay on his belly, fifteen feet above the ground. The ants floated down gracefully, some of them drifting a bit with the breeze. They would land on all sixes, take a few seconds to orient themselves and then soldier back to one of the points on their long line.

He was eleven, and this was his favourite spot in their house in an industrial township in the middle of a jungle in East India. He lay still there, not minding the sun on his back or the hard concrete of the roof barely carpeted with tar below him. Once in a while he would cross and uncross his legs. His chin rested on the fingers of his left hand. At random intervals – when he felt like it – he let his right thumb twitch and get out of the way of his middle finger which had been straining against it. Another ant would be neatly dispatched. It was important to do it neatly. There was time.

There was a big guava tree in the backyard which he used to climb up to the roof of the house. There was another route along the ledge which he used to climb down, and then cross over a small boundary wall to the roof of the servant’s quarter. From there he would move on to the big boundary wall separating them from the neighbours behind them and get back to the tree which had grown into their neighbours’ space. It made a nice circuit, and he could spend hours moving lazily along it especially in the afternoons before his playtime.

On some days, like that day, there were large black ants. He used to tick them off the roof and watch them floating down.  You couldn’t fool around with the red ones, and the small black ones were no fun. With the large black ones, you had to be careful and get the action right so that they couldn’t bite you. It hurt like hell if they did. But over time he had mastered the art of flicking the ants off the roof, with an action like a carom stroke. They were so small, and they were pushed off firm ground into thin air and made to drift through a distance which must have seemed enormous to them. It fascinated him that it didn’t seem to matter to them. They didn’t get into a group and attack him, and sometimes he used to wonder why. They would just meander a longish distance so that he couldn’t get to them any more. He didn’t ask his parents about it – may be because he didn’t want to tell them about the game he had invented.

He had left his Bata slippers on the ground below him. Only an idiot would navigate the crevices, stumps and holds of that circuit unless he was barefoot. His slippers had worn unevenly, tapering to a jagged sharp edge at the end where his feet had outgrown them. The balls of his feet had ground hollows into them. The hollows were blue like the straps and the rest of the soles were a muddy white. He wore a brown cotton T- shirt which had once been carefully tucked in to his dark blue shorts as he changed out of his school uniform.

He lay at one corner of their roof. To his right, there was a narrow concrete side lane followed by a stretch of domesticated greenery. Here there were trees at regular intervals, surrounded by decorative latticed brick walls which were taller than him, and which he sometimes climbed over when they played hide and seek. Further right there was the road which marked the end of their township. It was narrow but smooth, unlike the roads outside the township which were wider but mostly run down. In the township, the roads were neatly lined on both sides with red gravel. After the road, there were the electricity and telephone lines. Still further to the right there was the storm water drain with gentle slopes. He had navigated his Atlas cycle into it when he rode it the first time without support. He had left behind his cousin who was pushing him and he didn’t know how to get off it. After the drain, there were the remnants of the thick jungle of mainly saal trees which had been razed to make place for the factory and the township.

At the crossing a few hundred metres below his feet, a concrete signpost announced the names of the roads. Long Road. Ridge Road. There weren’t too many roads actually, in that small township, but they were all announced proudly.

To his left, and above and below him, there were neat rows of houses. In his part of the township, they were built on eight hundred square yards each. The company was still doing well, and the houses and signs were kept gleaming most of the time. Every house compulsorily had a neat lawn in front, and a kitchen garden in the back. Their kitchen garden was dominated by the guava tree, but they also had two papaya trees, a lemon tree, tomato plants, the sacred basil plant, curry leaf, peas and a few plots of coriander and mint. Across the big boundary wall, there was an equally diverse garden but it did not have a single big tree dominating it.

To those who grew up in these industrial towns which dotted the country, even those who left early as some factories closed down, the time they spent there has a magical quality. The intervening years have tinted their memories so that they mostly remember the culture as an uber-cosmopolitan, super-civilized one. He doesn’t argue about it, but he’s not sure he wants to live in a “township” with his colleagues.

Anyway, he was up there, and that was when he got the feeling the first time – the feeling you get that someone you haven’t yet seen is watching you. He has got it a million times since then, but for sure that was the first time. By some magic, you choose between all the degrees of rotation available to you and zero in on the right direction to look at whoever is looking at you.

He saw the maid Sandhya who had stopped coming to their place – he didn’t get to know why. She was still working with their neighbours who lived behind them.  She had just plucked a few guavas from the tree with a bamboo pole.

The pole was still in her hands and the guavas were in the fold of her green sari. They hadn’t made the thud of landing on the ground because she had got them in to fall into a pouch she made with her sari. He had seen her do that earlier.

There was this time when he had got whacked because of her. He and his friends used to cycle a lot. He had a red-and-white Atlas cycle to start with, and much later a black Sen Raleigh. The jungle at the edge of the township had well-worn paths through it where people and animals had passed through. They cycled through the jungle to reach an abandoned shooting range. The range was a twenty- feet- high brick wall supporting a mound of mud, and a field in front. They climbed the mud hill and found the shells of cartridges embedded in the mud. They went cycling behind the nearby government hospital, and saw a dog carrying a small skull away. These experiences were their deepest secrets, and they whetted their risk- taking ability. The parents didn’t mind, or may be they forgot to tell them. Once they decided on a stretch target and headed for the hill at City Centre. He did the trip when he went back many years later. It is about three kilometers, and the hill is piddly. Back then, it was the farthest they would have been ever, without an adult or a Dada or Didi accompanying them. You not only left the safe haven of the township, but also crossed another township and drove along the infamous Grand Trunk Road. They made it to the hill and back, but Sandhya saw them on the way back. Of course he got whacked by his mother, and so did his friends by their respective parents. They were forbidden to leave the township after that. A child had died in road accident a while back. Sandhya later told him that she had to tell his parents because it just wasn’t safe for him. She stroked his head.

And then there was the other time. She had been bending over to grate some mangos once and he couldn’t take his eyes off her soft curves. It crossed his mind that she had had them all along but he had never looked. He knew he shouldn’t be looking now but he couldn’t stop. Then suddenly she had looked up straight into his eyes. He had felt an uncomfortable flush come over him and the stiffness happened. They looked at each other for a few seconds and then he turned his gaze away, but not before he saw that she smiled at him. It wasn’t a smile of malice or mockery. There was something about it which made him realize that she was amused but she didn’t look down on him. She had stopped coming to their place a little later.

He didn’t actually think about either of these incidents as he lay on the roof that afternoon. But they were a part of him, like a snake and a ladder on the path to that point in his life.

He had been pretty still in that corner up there, with only his head projecting from the roof so that he could watch the ants floating down. She probably saw him when he moved a bit and then their gazes locked. Her eyebrows rose and her jaw dropped. From that distance, he saw furrows form fleetingly on her forehead. Then the furrows disappeared and she lowered her gaze. When she looked up again, she stared calmly at him. They looked at each other for a while. There was the distance between them, and the wall.

He doesn’t know how long the moment lasted.

His face broke into a smile. She didn’t smile back, but something changed in the lines of her face. They became softer. She unfroze and disappeared effortlessly. The green of her sari melted into the trees.

Glossary

Saal – species of tree found in Eastern India and other parts of South Asia.
Dada – elder brother.
Didi – elder sister

Wendi Lee

April 28, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Wendi Lee was born and raised in Honolulu, and has lived in Kentucky, New York City, and Pittsburgh. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has work published in Karamu, Plainsongs, Oyez Review, Fox Cry Review, Inkwell, Common Ground Review, Sierra Nevada College Review, Roanoke Review, The Portland Review, Weave Magazine, 34th Parallel, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

A Quiet Almost Lost

for my Father

We walked at dusk, a quiet
almost lost in the future
of phone calls and hospital sheets.
We walked down
cooling streets, rush hour evaporated
into empty rows of lawn,
sprinkler left to wet the sidewalk
in rotating arcs.
Plumeria trees, a patch of mint
where grass should be. We wore
matching sweatshirts, gray,
with zippers down the front and hoods
we never used. We must have looked alike,

ambling past Hunakai Street, past
an old woman hunched low
over her yard work. Perhaps she recognized
the sameness pressed into our faces.
Was the resemblance still there,
years later? You shrunk down to child’s size,
no more nervous system,
no more legs
for long neighborhood walks.

The Dead, My Heart

The dead gather in the living room
of my dreams, refusing
forest green cushions,
the couch stretched
like a long, thoughtless cruise.
They have been sitting forever —
now
they wish to stand.
Their voices like sparrows,
dancing in the limbs
of a wintered tree.
I wait for the wisdom prised away
from sweet,
sticky flesh,
but the dead find
interest only in living.
They caress the knotted bones
at my wrist, tangle
in my hair.
They pass around my heart,
chattering in wonder at its clench
and sigh,
remembering the skipped beats,
timpani of fear,
symphony of lust, the slow
deep murmur
of approaching
sleep.

Doll House

Father, in your narrow hallways
I am still lost,
The dust falling from thick green curtains
You used to shut out the miracles
Of sunlight.  Once you stood on the porch
In a shirt stained thick with red,
My hair dye, the blood
We couldn’t see, to keep
Her from looking inside.
Linoleum cold under my feet, I ran
Past the cat hiding in a dollhouse
Shuttered, abandoned
For the pursuits of growing up.
I ran every night down the hallway
From bathroom to the safe glow
Of television commercials
And ice cubes melting into Coca-Cola.
Sometimes you looked up
To laugh at me, but more often than not
You didn’t look.
And some part of me is still running.