First Star
What happened was that someone moved in
next door, into the haunted apartment.
She brought only herself — there must have
been bags, few or many, but no vans came,
no men — no hint of furniture whatsoever.
Suddenly in silence she was here
and behind the shared wall we felt her
and before long we breathed back in liturgy.
Looking back now I see it was the neighbour
that kept us together. Finally we had something
in common, something to latch on to —
both of us slippery with forethought
of future griefs, too similar to settle into
something real until she gave us shape —
first star in a long and tedious night — and as we
crouched with our ears to the door your face
brightened with the possibility that, after all,
the fear might subside. That maybe we were
capable of new inventions, that if we could only
hear her speak we could die happy.
Mystery was the only thing keeping us alive.
Though we confused mystery with secrecy
the instinct was true — with the knowledge of
good and evil came the failure of god and so too
the abundance of absence. Lightfingered, fate:
I thought I had you and you thought you knew me.
But for now at least we had something nearly real.
That night we clustered at the window breathless,
bewildered, with all the weight of a ritual —
and then we heard her wailing. And then I felt
your hand on my elbow, the first time in years.
Gate
What my mother gave me in this country
overrun with civil servants was a sense
of magnitude. There was a fatefulness
in the way she beat me, a sense
of the romantic: wild, compulsive. Once
I mistook form for fact and anger for love —
later I exchanged feeling for control,
trading one weakness for another.
And again I was mistaken: the hoodwinked
wife is robbed of all control. I was humbled,
made small, then ruthless.
Perhaps the most disturbing blaze of
knowledge is suddenly having nothing
to lose. From every memory and intention
there is now nothing left to burn, only
material to sieve. From nothing I think
of how my mother bred competence
into my body, splicing and grafting until
her vision took root. Even then it wasn’t
enough to save me from her past, my
future. If there’s anything I’ve learned
it’s this: to love is to defend another person
from one’s worst self
___________
Lisabelle Tay is the author of Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). Her poetry and short fiction
appear in Bad Lilies, Sine Theta Magazine, and elsewhere.
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