Two Poems
Rent from DeepDyve- Two Poems
instincts
That winter the animals committed suicide.Instead of hibernating, the moles and bearsembroidered their comrades’ coriander shrouds.Beavers in their bundled-down beds gnawedapart their own dams. Badgers roastedin their setts, fish flung themselveson ice and lay there gasping, frogs rustleddown in their thistled holes and refused to breathe.Down the middle of the road, skunks and squirrelsventured to the line between north and death,bursting one by one as the cars trundled past,red and gaping as they rolled overand over into winter’s unmade dry ditches.
We hunkered unrepentant,squirming, not animal enoughto live or go. They say rats jumpa sinking ship. But for our cowardice,snow-laden willows hung their necks in shame. [End Page 93]
after the warmth
After the warmth of you in the morning,like sugar, like ozone, the sweatof pines, after the knotting and twining,
you came unravelling inside me,the wound skein of yourselfbursting like the blood from the skinsof split grapes, bursting.
Each molecule of you,particle or wave, movinginside me like live light. [End Page 94]
Grace Chua is a journalist with the Straits Times. Her poems have been published in such journals as Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Softblow, and anthologized in From Boys To Men. Her first collection of poetry, The Stamp Collector’s Wife, was published in 2010.
