a much needed update

i often forget that this blog exists and i'm sorry for neglecting it for so long.
i promise to post more regularly, really.

anyways, here is a piece that i wrote with my good friend, joshua foster as a collaboration for the fall issue of freckled (a magazine that i co-run with my best friend shanene) which was released a few months ago. i hope you'll enjoy it. you can check out the issue in its fullest entirety here.

"Time Zones"

(I) by Joshua Foster

She leaves her home while the birds are sleeping
and the flightless travellers wish they were sleeping,
or at least had something to keep them awake.

Walking through twice forgotten laneways
her shadow repaints sun stained walls,
while she listens to branches conversing with the wind
as it stutters and stumbles by,
clumsily dropping rumours of Winter
‘I’ve h-heard he’s on his way!’

Arriving at the station, eyes out of synch
swaying like the needle of an untrained metronome,
she separates the 50% wool, 50% cotton wagers
strangers have placed on Autumn’s mood.

As she waits, she opens her book, page 97
four months have bound
her fragile hands from the veiny pages
and in the meantime a dandelion floret has settled
between the crooked dog-eared crease.

It’s no longer the mini-helicopter
she remembers as a sun kissed child
but instead a lost firework
from a faded Summer evening,
muffled by the equinox.

(II) by Ting Shuen

The callused soles of his chestnut wingtips
mourned the cacophonous pitter patter of November’s showers
as he unwillingly wrestled and refused to surrender to Nature’s stubborn metronome.

The half-forgotten verses of William Shakespeare:
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
they have their exits and their entrances…”
silently lingered and fell asleep within the vacant abstractions
of his vintage Filson.

A pair of 35 mm cameras sought sanctuary;
steadfastly perched beneath the southernmost hemisphere
on the waning map of his wax-like eyelids:
his frostbitten pupils, all rain-swollen and wide-angled
filmed the odes and eulogies,
absent-mindlessly recited by the 10 o’clock passengers
as he approached the 10 o’clock platform.

He rest assured in seat twelve ‘b:’
fingers crossed for first impressions
and second chances.

“I do believe we’ve met before,
but I don’t believe in pseudonyms.
My name is Autumn.
Take care, Winter.”

(III) by Ting Shuen

It is where Summer and Winter meet, it is the fractured veins of a hemlock’s stray child haphazardly sewn onto the leather outsoles of your burgundy loafers, it is the tears of condensation your kettle cries as it impatiently waits to be poured into your eight o’clock pot of earl grey, it is the innocent scars from your feathered paperbacks and your honey-and-milk-stained mug sunken into the marbled skin of your living room mantelpiece, it is the petty, short-lived quarrels of the howling wind and the ill-tempered rain that awkwardly cross paths with your pneumonic complexion, it is the archival palette of Harvard crimsons and Cuban mahoganies and woodland emeralds resurrected from your grandmother’s anthology of fair-isle sweaters, it is the unspoken soliloquies that Autumn so eloquently rehearses before Winter takes the stage.

"biographies"

after awhile, the most intriguing strangers become a sort of fiction.
you begin to see them in diptychs;
the contours and lines of their pasts and futures
sewn together by the missing jigsaw puzzle pieces
currently hidden under your quilted couch in your living room,
by the negatives from the pentax disposable cameras you developed all too long ago
and filtering through alternating eye contact and brainstormed, ad-libbed dialogue
(a game of chess)
and their second-hand gazes.
(they’re only second-hand, because they’re all too familiar)
we’re always chasing and holding onto lost memories,
reminders and discarded post-it notes of all that we once knew
or the answers we’ve never known.
(they’re still pending)
we all suffer from amesia,
(don’t worry, it’s only temporary)
until we get struck by lightning
and our sight becomes cloudless.
we’re always trying to find our way home.
(checkmate)

"acrophobia"

swallowed beneath an azure, hazy sea of fog,

we became the mountains.

20,000 feet above all that we know, all that we are.

“we have officially begun our descent.”

firmly pressed against the facet of my window seat, you believed in respiration.

i choked on air, all white-skinned and ashen.

you knew i was chasing slumber,

to fall into a terminal coma;

until a voice spoke:

“welcome home.”

untitled

it was something to do with the way your arms drew like vines when you moved.

the way they’d intertwine and weave so effortlessly like the french braids you wore in your hair when you were seven.

or maybe it was the way the pallid tulle fabric from your frayed petticoat would knowingly elevate itself by flight like black widows knitting their cobwebs; verses and strokes onto some spilled canvas; mine.

or the way the peach in your gaunt soles quivered like roots stemming from the ground en pointe, all callused and bruised and phantom limbs.

or the way your pirouettes and grand jetés were enunciated like soft-spoken hallelujahs under some celestial sky.

or the way i knew you once.

or the way your history beckoned to be narrated; for your entire existence to overflow into fine-grained, milk-eyed hues of coral and sea foam and cerulean.

or the way you beseeched to be resurrected by my tabula rasa; all life-sized and concrete.

you were more than just skin and bones, you promised.

we spend the majority of our lives waiting; waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to end, waiting for something to begin. that ‘something’ is most definitely life itself and why are we waiting? why do we wait for something that is blatantly and inevitably right before our eyes? why do we choose to ignore life? are we afraid of it? i think we are. we fear, yet we lust over the idea of the unknown, yet the fear takes its toll and we are left, waiting. it’s not fair, is it?