Travel & Transitioning Three Poems Gratitude To think of gratitude and to think of thank you cards instead, the small panic of them, the pressure to buy the ones with black and white Parisian photograph covers and the blank insides, ready for your profound message, you writer, you beautiful liar; you are supposed to be… Leigh Stein weiterlesen
Autor: Cyril Wong
Martina Pfeiler
Travel & Transitioning The Philippines Manila International Airport, 1987 “Anything to declare?” she asks, and I say “Yeah”. I saw the happiest man on earth, dressed in a potato sack in the streets of Cagayan de Oro City. I saw a “girl-boy” on Kalamkam Beach, when I was ten, half-guessing, half-knowing what that meant. I… Martina Pfeiler weiterlesen
Gaston Ng
Travel & Transitioning Next Stop On the bus, I realise it’s easy to fall In love with the train-driver, Knowing adventure and adrenalin, Speed and direction, Knowing both it and its limitations. We draw all these lines around things we love, Children in sandboxes marking territories. Did the sandbox agree to be split? After rain,… Gaston Ng weiterlesen
Peter Murphy
Travel & Transitioning Two Poems ‘Maniar’ It’s the largest city square in Europe, the guide book says. We sit down. Lurid posters (mostly flame and shadow) advertise a feature on the Bali bombing. You take the thermos out and, as we choose pastries, a beggar approaches. ‘Maniar. Maniar,’ he keeps on saying. He won’t go… Peter Murphy weiterlesen
Dawn Lim
Travel & Transitioning Quantum Physics Quantum Physics (extracts) I have flown through 20 pages of blue in an airplane to write my name on the window with wet fingers: the transparency of glass on glass waiting to be articulated. ~ Alighting, I shiver from the lightness of a sky’s foreign touch. The opening of a… Dawn Lim weiterlesen
Koh Beng Liang
Travel & Transitioning Two Poems Cuba Three things filled the abandoned room – dust, sunlight and the silence. I stood below the blackened chandelier, hanging from the high ornate ceiling, fearing the lead from paint specks peeling off the walls. In the adjoining room I spied through the neglected doors a nude painting, a white… Koh Beng Liang weiterlesen
Karl Koweski
Travel & Transitioning Three Poems Breakwater if you remain in your car all you can see is the breakwater. ragged chunks of concrete pieces of rebar jutting out like mummified fingers. Lake Michigan lays there a dead ocean indistinguishable from its mortuary slab. smell the embalming fluid, a noxious mixture of detergent and petroleum byproducts… Karl Koweski weiterlesen
S. K. Kelen
Travel & Transitioning Two Poems A Travellers’ Guide to the East Indies 1. To arrive anywhere tonight you travel a road lit only by fireflies to towns whose names mean ‘tomb of a hundred martyrs’. Invisible birds sing tinkling vowels – words from a time before history invaded. Frogs roar louder and louder kickstarting… S. K. Kelen weiterlesen
Kris T Kahn
Travel & Transitioning Bidding Travelling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents… – Italo Calvino Any progression, whether by aeroplane or steam engine, deserves a sense of reflection. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the two… Kris T Kahn weiterlesen
Terry Jaensch
Travel & Transitioning Two Poems Sight-Seer Haggling at Clarke Quay I keep my humour, the proprietor his – jovial but firm. The joke an antiquity, punch-line a rumour. The Quay plainly put: bent at this juncture. More aesthete than buyer the argument’s won in looking farther afield. Or flattering his smoking gun – drawn from… Terry Jaensch weiterlesen