Our 2019 Hawkers

Third Place, $300
“Among the ruins of the Observatory” by Gabrielle Leung

Published by Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (Vol. 17, No. 3 Jul 2018)

"Estos, alma, ¡ay dolor¡ que ves ahora
Campos de soledad, monton de escombros
Fueron un tiempo cupula famosa.”

On the day the Manila Observatory
was burned to the ground—I translate
the manuscript word by word inside

the archives—four Japanese soldiers came
to spray the floors with gasoline.
Outside, the sun is high in the sky.

The first astronomical dome in the country
curled into flames, the room that kept
the time shrinking into itself as though

undoing the hours into dust. There is only
one photo of the aftermath, and outside,
it looks as though still standing. Manila burning

in the background, I imagine. The photo
keeps me on the outside. It smells of dust,
and faintly, smoke. The photographer's shaking

hands as Father Selga stood inside the remains
of his Observatory, trying to piece together
the rubble that had once been instruments

for measuring the winds. Five days later,
the Americans dropped liberation-bombs
and finished the job. There is no inside to this

grief. The ruins brought to the ground, bodies
and glass: I cannot think of the noise. They must have
known they would leave eighty years of ash. I do not

know if Father Selga watched the stars that night,
if he saw clouds on the horizon, and prayed
for the rain to still. There are no monuments

for this. I was told once that Father Selga was
a beautiful writer, but I cannot read Spanish.
My dictionary has no word for séame.

Honourable Mention
“Lorca (6)” by Chris Huntington

Published by Singapore Unbound’s SP Blog (4th Singapore Poetry Contest Results)

Dear Federico,

I walked out of a plane from Singapore and found your old house where you left it in Granada. I wish you’d been home when I came. I walked for hours under the Spanish half-moon you left me like a broken silver knife in the sky. Your words, not mine. In Dona Rosita the Spinster, you called the Alhambra “the jasmine of sadness/ where the moonlight rests.” Federico, in Singapore, jasmine is the tea I drink. I arrived at the Alhambra before dawn and walked from one end to the other beneath the long wall on the hill, but every door was gated and locked. When the sun came up, the moon pulled my shoulders and kissed me, which made me want to cry. Is this how you felt when you looked up at the sun that last afternoon? Before the bullets opened your chest? I saw a movie set in Andalucia, but they ruined it, of course, by making it look like something out of a video game. Everything was about three times larger than real-life, whatever that is. The streets in the movie were full of dirty laundry and dust. I preferred your Andalusia, so full of loneliness and the smell of flowers. The horses in this movie galloped too fast, carriages bouncing all over the sky. So many chases, unlike my own experience, which is that when we say good-bye, that’s it. In the movie, the Moors and the Templars were at war and it wasn’t clear whose side God was on, which was the only part I found convincing. Federico, once when I was reading Harry Potter, the characters passed a witch who was covered by a veil from head to toe. You don’t know Harry Potter but I think you must have known some witches. I imagine a dark-eyed woman wearing nothing but a veil; she is a shadow beneath a shadow but I know her shoulders must be hot to the touch. I would like to lie with a gypsy in a fragrant cave above Granada, the smell of roses and sweet wine on her skin. I would rather do that than read. But perhaps I’m boring you, Federico; you never cared much for women. Later in the book, it turns out this witch was a man in disguise. Life! A witch beneath a veil, laughter in a dark cave, the sound of a horse galloping and the shadow of olive trees beneath the moon? Everything true is like a dream and can’t be improved upon with art. I’m sure you would agree. Though we keep trying, don’t we? Because there are so many nights without witches or caves and all we have is paper and the moon.

Christine Chia is the author of The Law of Second Marriages and its sequel Separation: a history. She is also the co-editor of the groundbreaking poetry anthologies A Luxury We Cannot Afford, A Luxury We Must Afford and Lines, Spark, Code. Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Unfree Verse, The Arts House and the W!ld Rice play Another Country. (Photo credit: Jon Gresham)

Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz is Associate Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines Mindanao in Davao City, recipient of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Literary Award, and former president of the Davao Writers Guild. Her books include Women Loving. Stories and a Play and the poetry chapbook Heartwood. She is currently a creative practice PhD candidate in RMIT University, Australia.

ko ko thett is a poet by choice and Burmese by chance. He serves as country editor for Myanmar at Poetry International and poetry editor at Mekong Review. He is a recipient of a PEN Translation Award and an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. His most recent poetry collections are The Burden of Being Burmese and “ေလယူေလသိမ္း [Accent]”. (Photo credit: Victor Shen)