Our 2020 Hawkers

First Place, $1500
“At the Empress: An Epithalamium” by Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Published by Singapore Unbound’s SP Blog (5th Singapore Poetry Contest Results)

for V. and C., with lines

from Donne and de Bernières

 Tonight, around this flowering tree, you’ve called forth
a family from across every sea. What draws us—not greed
but love—though aren’t we all a little touched by empire

on this island, where the simplest sentiment is complicated
by legacies of sultanates and settlements, invasions and trade-
winds across the South China Sea? Will we ever remake history?

This is a happy occasion, you say, but the words catch. How grief
cleaves the heart—or cleaves it to another. We are both one thing
and another—the beast’s fabled grimace, facing east across the bay.

At each table, the orchids’ flagrant, silky cheeks, arrayed
in decadent crests over the skin of a suckling pig, crisped
to a succulent sheen. Braised abalone, soup with sea whelk.

But this is no Far East fairytale. Your union’s a complex matrix
of geography, time zones—love’s practical, maddening calculus.
Your lives’ constant negotiation between Chennai and Changi.

What I wish for you: airiness—not a breach, but an expansion,
the ability to be more than one place at once. To be both soul
and substance—or rather, two souls, which are one—for always.

Can we still talk about beauty? Or truth? Maybe what I’m trying
to say is that on the banks of the Singapore River—flanked on
all sides by international titans of commerce, glittering cityscape

across the water—love isn’t breathless excitement, but roots
grown together, beneath life’s substrate—that which endures
after every other empire has fallen, been bought or traded.

The last song stills. We say our goodbyes. How to stand, ravaged
by distance, time—the ocean’s thunderous arc, breaking through
the lion’s teeth? Sometimes you have to break to hold the light.

This is not a poem but a prayer, a way to open the hands
and let the light in—take my whole life, too—there you stand,
hand in hand—dense evening air, birdsong, flowering tree—

not two but one—this, the moment—the choosing, the binding,  
a flock of starlings, startled into flight—your roots entangled
beneath this new ancient city, built on the oldest foundations.

Third Place, $300
“Golden” by Nicholas Wong

Published by OF ZOOS (Issue 8.1)

001
Despite what all linguists have said, you have to agger
That the goodest English
Is the identity of our physical forms 

Or that it is banal between lovers but it is not that  

002
It is pretentious / 煩膠
To begin a poem with quotes
By Mei-mei Berssenbrugge or Anne Carson  

003
“Why not? They’re serious poets”
Because 認真就輸了  

004
回帶 : The goodest English
(According to Anagram Genius)
Is delights on egos  

005
Now that we have laid the foundation
That poetry is about playfulness
Let’s move forward 

“Agger”  

006
Since June, two hordes of beasts
Are in conflict with each other 

One accusing the other, “You’ve made a living seam”
While the other defends, “That’s a living sail”  

007
中出 is what seems to be a solution
A middle exit a neutral exit a potential of witness and intent  

008
(A group of 左膠 is nodding)  

009
Yet, neutrality is not a compromise
The former is a disguise for one’s missing
Bells of shame, whereas 

Compromise is very much like seeing
Remorse reflected in a shop’s window
And exposing yourself from an affair that way  

010
Aren’t you worried
“No”
Aren’t you worried about those guys
“No”
Aren’t you worried that those guys came but had to sit alone
“Yes”

 011
Companionship is comforting
As applesauce (fact-checked)  

012
Though my arms my butt my guts
Are not J-able as those of the 巴打
On the front line 

May they still take notice of me and my requests  

013
Teach me HTML
Teach me how to sleep 

Through the nights that have stopped
Their wrangle about rationality as they used to  

014
To justify my hehe FF, allow me to bring in Bruce Lee  

015
Who has once said, “If nothing within you stays
Rigid, outward things will disclose themselves” 

And “water can flow or it can crash”
(So, #bewater, my friend)  

016
One of those quotes is suspiciously homosocial 

As in quote 已 J
As in J 已 cut
As in cut 已 done
As in done 已 done  

017
When a narrative ends, be the hacksaw
Or hacksaw-ready 

 018
Not all water wants to drown. The plain one just wants to spill  

019
The city’s walls and streets will soon grow
Immune to bullets invented and not
啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪啪  

020
Take a voluble selfie with someone’s spinal ink

__________

Notes from the poet

The episodic work not only consciously plays with code-switching, but is also written with and out of internet Chinese slangs popular among Cantonese-speaking crowds in Hong Kong today. Most of the slangs are originated from two internet forums, namely GOLDEN​ (高登) and LIHKG​ (連登), which (especially the latter) play a significant role in the discussion on recent socio-political happenings in the city. Such slangs immediately become another form of “mystic code,” once they are extracted from their original contexts (often related to local and global popular cultures) and reapplied to suit the users’ needs. To use these slangs is a way to place a marker on one’s identity by excluding those who do seemingly and literally understand every word, but are unable to decipher the meaning because of difference in class, generation, or lacking internet literacy and the right cultural capital.

Notes on the slangs:

• 001 agger: originally the last name of Daniel Agger, a Danish footballer from the Liverpool Footfoot Club. Internet forum users adopted the word (by error at first, but with intention later) as a mutated form of agree. Goodest: an alternative, though ungrammatical, form of best, often used ironically to mock someone’s low English proficiency.

• 002​ 煩膠: a term coined and commonly used on GOLDEN, often referring to mean or ill-intended acts to provoke or cause annoyance. The term literally means “annoying plastic” in Chinese.

• 003​ 認真就輸了: originally from a novella of the same title by a Mainland Chinese author, in which characters use the phrase to describe transient romance. The phrase literally means “You lose when you’re serious about it” in Chinese.

• 004​ 回帶​: an internet term referring to the act of reposting old news as if it was new. The term literally means “rewind” in Chinese.

• 007​ 中出: originated in Japanese straight pornography, the term refers to the act of ejaculating inside the woman’s body. It was later used by internet forum users to mean irresponsible acts or decisions that cause trouble to others. Despite the term’s sexual denotation, it has been used numerous times in Hong Kong’s pro-China newspapers as an abbreviation of The Hong Kong Chinese Importers’ & Exporters’ Association. The term literally means “middle exit” in Chinese.

• 008​ 左膠: leftard. The term literally means “left plastic” in Chinese.

• 012​ J​: short for jer, which, in Cantonese, refers to the male penis. The alphabet’s part of speech varies in its colloquial usage. It can be a verb, a noun or an adjective. When used as a verb, it means “masturbating over (something/ someone)” or, metaphorically, “showing intense admiration towards (something/ someone).” 巴打: a Cantonese homophonic translation of the English word brother, which refers to male internet forum users.

• 013​ HTML: an abbreviation of How To Make Love.

• 014​ hehe: a popular term on GOLDEN since 2013, referring to gay issues or individuals. FF: short for fantasy; inspired by the video game Final Fantasy.

• 016​ y已x: a unique GOLDEN syntactical form that subverts traditional use of Chinese subject-verb collocation, which adopts the xy-structure (where x is a verb and y is a noun). The Chinese word “已” literally means already.

• 019​ 啪啪啪: an onomatopoeia originally referring to applause, but was later adopted by Hong Kong internet users as a metonymy for sexual intercourse.

Honourable Mention
“Ten Propositions on Disappointment” by See Wern Hao

Published by Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (Vol. 18, No. 3, Jul 2019)

1. Cezanne aimed to paint like the old masters and the impressionists: using the mind and the heart-eye simultaneously, to capture reality as both substance and ideation. In High Trees In Jas de Bouffan, the pastoral landscape which he depicted saw the leaves rustle and blur like static, refusing the still life, resisting the mandate of the wind, unyielding: neither here, nor here.

2. For being rejected numerous times by salons in Paris, Merleau-Ponty wrote of Cezanne: "Nine days out of ten, all he saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and of his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration."

3. In a foreign land, one first notices the sky. For instance, there are more cumulonimbus clouds in Florida because the light falls incident to the earth at a different angle. In the evening, they ripple, as if some levitating volcano coughed, sending plumes of cotton flames blooming from the sun. 

4. The pit, the ugly gritty dot on any ripe fruit, was once attached to the pedicel, the cord of conception.

5. A binder of authorities laid out in front of a rostrum is thicker than a holy text. An oral submission which follows is interpretation, is sermon. Nothing short of a pronouncement of faith, a pleading.

6. Yet the empirical world, with its daily machinations of rock parting to fire spilling into saltwater, has not nudged one bit for us.

7. "What changes is how we perceive it". I scoff at such cliches. I refuse such condescension, as if the contemplation of someone else's deeper grief is consolation for my own.

8. How we try to bury our pit: with unrelenting effort: by growing something even more whole and beautiful, with some hope of passing on an unblemished fruit.

9. In Bluets, Maggie Nelson acknowledges that in the end, "you have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet".

10. The pit of an orange just happened to face Cezanne as he painted Still Life With Soup Tureen. He did not turn the fruit to the wall. The black eye grew, and it met the initial gaze of each and every viewer, the punctum overshadowing the soup bowl next to it. It called out: I am here to be seen. I am here in all my rot, as pith and peel. I shield the fruit I have cultivated, this plump heart.

Honourable Mention
“I Tell The River That I Shall Pray Again” by Vinita Agrawal

Published by The Tiger Moth Review (Issue 2, 2019)

For years I've been trading promises with God.
Offering flowers for mercies, 
fasts for protection,
money for more wealth.

And now, it’s not as if I've stopped praying,
but something's muted over the years.
When I fold my hands at the altar
I'm thinking the flowers in the vase
need to be changed,
the brand of incense leaves too much ash,
the silver needs polishing, the frames need dusting.

Cremating you
and returning to the raven blackness of our home,
I fastened the urn of ashes 
to a clothesline outside the house
because it was bad omen to carry it inside.

Nothing epitomises waiting more
than a boat on the shore
or an urn of warm ashes
tied to a tree or a clothesline.

The river is the end to the wait, 
the final quencher of thirst.
Tonight I lie porous. 
Tomorrow the river will consume the ashes 
and fill me with prayers again. 

Honourable Mention
“1,801 of 1,216,451,004,088,320,000 read” by Zaw Lin Htoo, Xu Pei Min, Michelle Chan, and Margaret Devadason

Published by OF ZOOS (Issue 8.1)

__________

Notes from the poets

CAUTION: MOVING PARTS—this piece becomes something new every time it’s loaded—reshuffles/restates/reiterates.

Grace Chia is the author of nine books, including three poetry collections, Woman, Cordelia and Mother of All Questions. Her prose includes the short story collection, Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food, and a novel, The Wanderlusters. Her works have been widely anthologised in Singapore and internationally, and translated into French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and Serbo-Croat. She was the NAC-NTU Writer-in-Residence from 2011-2012, and was a resident writer at the Toji Cultural Centre. She has a forthcoming novel with Penguin Random House.

Carlomar Arcangel Daoana is the author of five collections of poetry, with The Elegant Ghost (University of the Philippines Press, 2019), as the most recent. The initial poems of the collection received First Place honors in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. His poems have been anthologized in the Vagabond Asia Pacific Poetry Series (Sydney and Tokyo), Naratif Kisah (Kuala Lumpur), and 11 x 9: Collaborative poetry from the Philippines and Singapore (Singapore). In 2019, he was a speaker at the George Town Literary Festival. Daoana teaches at Ateneo de Manila University’s Fine Arts Department.

Melizarani T. Selva is a Malaysian writer and spoken word poet with notable performances at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival and TEDxGateway Mumbai. Her first book Taboo made the Top 10 Best-Seller List on Malaysia’s No.1 Online Bookstore (MPH). To date, her poems have been translated to French and Bahasa Malaysia. She recently co-published an anthology comprising of 100 poems by 61 poets from Malaysia titled When I Say Spoken, You Say Word! and now co-runs the Malaysia National Poetry Slam. (Photo Credit: Aiman Azri)