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May Chong
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the poet
May Chong, a Chinese/Malaysian poet and speculative writer, has had her work featured in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, adda, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. She enjoys spoken word (watching and performing), birdwatching and terrible puns. May's nature-themed micro-chapbook, Seed, Star, Song, is available as part of Ghost City Press' Summer 2020 series.
the poems
You ask the soil
if you belong
What has always been whispered
through other leaves grows bold,
thunderclaps laterite-red:
never.
Transplant, hue and clay,
your roots never the right length.
Untrue/half-bred
not hybrid, weed
not plant. Be silent
and show some gratitude
for this flowerbed,
for being at all
allowed. If you protest,
tear up taproots
and leave, raw
mandrake words and all.
Never mind how
we were all planted
once upon a time.
One more time.
The loess left behind answers
come home. You will be welcome
and warm, one with brethren
abandoned before seedcoat thoughts.
Come home, you must
return to ancestral yellow,
mellow alluvium
where no others are allowed.
(But you have already torn/
been torn tongue
from stem to survive.
You feel the way you will
wither, alone in a field
of pinched heads.)
Rocks whisper from where
black dragons tumbled them
riverwise.
In your sap runs neverbelonging,
mountain thrust into monsoon.
We are all of us guests
from nowhere. The knowing
makes it easier to bear
the stones.
And still
you want.
You awaken. Again
you ask the soil if you belong,
and you should not be
grateful for silence. Yet
you are.
Lockdown
Grant me space secured
with key, myself and I. Walls
of my own creation, closest
to a one-man hug. A floor
to take a stand on, because
the letting in has meaning. Give me
granite and blood concrete
before those who have ripped
'moment' and 'wait' and 'just'
from their dictionary. Swallow
the deep diggers who think
keys are only for those
in hiding. My time has its meaning,
its rhythm and combinations
because bolts in the head are trouble
and padlocks through the heart
are worse. Ask the selves
I debrided, husbanded, ribs toothed
like tiger traps. Vulnerability
has meaning, meaning let me
slam the door closed
and fling it wide to let
you in, you
who means something.
And even now
A radish waxes defiant
in the asphalt below JR Osaka station’s
pedestrian bridge. A man thinks
of its rich tresses,
his granddaughter, the last time
he felt like smiling.
Near Wangsa Maju, a moth flies
into a packed LRT. Small as hope,
alive. A whole carriage holds
its breath until it lands on
a Bangladeshi worker's chapalled toe.
Some nameless brown bird gurgles
into the rain-soaked morning.
Soon there will be sun
and wind enough for everything
to dry gorgeous.
Silence is learning how
to unlock love, unlock
tears from behind teeth,
loose them with the gasp
of something born anew.
You learn from your elders how to make broth
from the good bones of a world
and still,
and still,
and still—
Publishing credits
You ask the soil if you belong: Bending Genres (Issue 19)
Lockdown: exclusive first publication by iamb
And even now: Banshee (Issue 12)