Christian Yeo
Issue 1: RISE, July 2023
The rapeseed fields are parsing through what belongs to memory and what to loneliness. I sleep with a turn of phrase, then awake reciting its name. The schools are welcoming back bicycle-bound children in this lung of a town. In spite of the year I hold my peace how a man holds a child, tremulous, not knowing he will break it in other ways. It is not as if we can speak any more about the disease, or coffee, or our great voracious antipathy. All my friends have turned into screens suspended like angels. Unlike Lazarus I lie down behind the back gate seeking to become soluble, absorbed into the nightgales as sleep-eyed pathos. In place of language, the inchoate leaving spreads in the body, calls itself shame. Oh god, oh love, oh new audacious turf. Now the blues have emptied the thing, turned it upside down and shaken the life out unexplained. The likeness of her says I have acquired a lack so deep it will not be filled by lyric. The better view is I was miming our speech-acts the way men in my family have always mimed love, love, that thing, so small and so difficult to bear, survivable from habit like water after fifteen shots, water under the bridge, water everywhere spraying like piss. A grandfather’s fourth grandchild steps on his feet, the mother shouts across the living room hoping in secret for toes to dissolve into pixels. The grandfather sees in the boy the first shape of cruelty, the boy ascertains the instinct firstly, hazards shrillness in the form of a woman. Oh lord, oh god, oh love, oh lark, oh my lichened heart. The dark bear grows on my back like moss or self-loathing, asphalt growing into skin, this heavy snarling thing, the chimera clawing until it is named and not escaped. Oh lord, oh bright, oh my morning light, the tight weave, the tight weave of all these things. The rapeseed fields are parsing through what belongs to memory and what to loneliness. I sleep with a turn of phrase, then awake reciting its name. The schools are welcoming back bicycle-bound children in this lung of a town. In spite of the year I hold my peace how a man holds a child, tremulous, not knowing he will break it in other ways. It is not as if we can speak any more about the disease, or coffee, or our great voracious antipathy. All my friends have turned into screens suspended like angels. Unlike Lazarus I lie down behind the back gate seeking to become soluble, absorbed into the nightgales as sleep-eyed pathos. In place of language, the inchoate leaving spreads in the body, calls itself shame. Oh god, oh love, oh new audacious turf. Now the blues have emptied the thing, turned it upside down and shaken the life out unexplained. The likeness of her says I have acquired a lack so deep it will not be filled by lyric. The better view is I was miming our speech-acts the way men in my family have always mimed love, love, that thing, so small and so difficult to bear, survivable from habit like water after fifteen shots, water under the bridge, water everywhere spraying like piss. A grandfather’s fourth grandchild steps on his feet, the mother shouts across the living room hoping in secret for toes to dissolve into pixels. The grandfather sees in the boy the first shape of cruelty, the boy ascertains the instinct firstly, hazards shrillness in the form of a woman. Oh lord, oh god, oh love, oh lark, oh my lichened heart. The dark bear grows on my back like moss or self-loathing, asphalt growing into skin, this heavy snarling thing, the chimera clawing until it is named and not escaped. Oh lord, oh bright, oh my morning light, the tight weave, the tight weave of all these things.
Christian is a writer and actor based in Singapore. He has been featured notably in The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among many others, and won or placed for a number of prizes including the Bridport Prize. Find him at christianyeo.com.