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千里香
A locative story written in 2018. In its original form, the story would be read on a portable device, each section unlocked when the reader arrives at a given location in person. To emulate that experience, I have included with each section a photograph of its corresponding unlock location. Qianlixiang: the thousand-mile fragrance. A white…
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A letter to a soon-defunct address
Originally published on Facebook Notes, and then on Medium. I think I’ve finally composed my thoughts on RGS. “Home is where the heart is” — that’s a line that I’ve believed ever since five-year-old me heard it in a song from a long-forgotten cartoon. When we pack up and leave a familiar place for good,…
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Drift
We once thought we could fathom the vastness of the seafrom the lap of an island shore. Watching ships tiltacross the horizon, we laughed, knowing nothingcould survive the fall. We did not see how, deep beyond the continental margins, submarinecanyons channeled secret rivers onto underwater plains, or howthe abyssal fish slowly went blind, their unseen lightsspeckling…
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I was looking at the sea
Sometimes you’re approaching the sea from atop a slope and you see ships hauling containers and you think about how much of this universe is invisible to you, known through the implication of its existence. Container ships, broken parcels in the mail, tell you people exist whom you’ve never met. They tell you even what…
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Alienation
They don’t tell you there are fewer starsin some places than others.The city frightens themwith the threat of their obsoleting, and they hide to savetheir light. There are fewer stars in places where personhoodis loudest. They don’t tell you alienation is spelledin unfamiliar constellations. Astronomic signposts dipout of sight, occluded by some dark enormityas the…
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Springwood Height
Their genealogies are manifold: there is no record of wherethey were sewn, or sutured, as with a wound. Dismember their home as they may, they eat fromthe same tarnished pot, the same boiled grain and thoughthey may spit and rinse the taste from their mouths afterwardsthey return to the pot, to share their seed. I do not…
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Coming of age
When I was thirteen years old, I began to feel the bird inside me. Crammed inside a pelvis too small for its wings, it was trying to unfold. It burbled something, hoarsely, a parody of birdsong, as I stared and pretended not to hear. I was inside a tepid factory of scratching pens and clattering clocks,…
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Love is deciduous
Meeting you the first time was likeburrowing fingers into fragrant soil after rainto find earthworms, curled up like springs and summersin the notches in the feet of trees.And in some vernal ways too it was likethe sun glowing through green cocoons abovethe swing, revealing maps of veinsand corpses melting to nectarsoon to be stitched and…
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“What’s on your mind?”
It is strange that cold after heat registers as a pleasant tingling across the skin. Why is it pleasant? Why do we call it pleasantness? It is stranger to think that the cold, wonderful and skin-tingling, will persist long beyond the end of all terrestrial life,or that the same sights capable of producing a similar frisson will continue to glowto the blindness of lifeless space in which the planets and stars would simplybe nameless balls…
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Tree of Life
I existed in the shadow of history, when the stars were cold and learning to breathe. I existed in a scattering of plans, a flickering behind a nebula. I remember, within the slants and bends of my branches, the scattering of photons, the accretion of matter, and the moulding of planets. I remember something of…
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Blue
Windmill-shoulder precipicesspinning gannet eggs on tangledwildgrass snares, harbour bells booming and anchorsbreaking spray beneath the bellows of bull-shark horns Pounding sails, roaring blades slitting skies driving cogsexoskeletons crushed by bitter beaks, stinging seawaterstoking wounds in lips and scaleson tongues blander than clouds, edged knife-like like bloodand brine which wind the windings of the tongue the same way, salt in cuts smarting, stonefish, urchins, iodine easing pain through cracks inskin and seagulls sliding, the twang of wires slipping through thethrumming feathers of birds bumping against the empty skinstretched across my window, a brief pretence of blue.
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This Century
How does it feel? She wonders. The thought plods across her mind like a dark beast, churning up tracks in the mud of her mind. Her eyes linger on the faint lights of the town down amongst the knolls, but everything smells like farmland where she is—the goodly scent of earthy wheat, the less friendly odours.…
