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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Becoming an HDB Flat by Ann Ang

 

Riding the lift up,
I grow as tall as you
and emerge, sixteen stories
above our bricked-in horizon.
My face is one of many flat-roofs,
dish-eyed with water tanks.

Both of us exhale the sky
which, at one o'clock
is sweating white, and up our flanks
shiver the sounds of school buses returning.
Children slap their chalk-shoes at my ankles.
A mynah shrieks. That's my beauty mole.

I bristle with laundry and potted pandan.
I smell my pits
where mattresses are left to sun
and wheeze humid TV static.
There is bad gas from the ninth-floor karaoke.

Mostly I stand columned
on stumps over a void,
absent in the afternoon's slow wrinkling,
until someone hurls a bag of rubbish down my gullet:
fifteen stories of swallowed tongue.
The effluvia of rush-hour footfalls
is a rash in my corridors.
I scratch and find blood
in flats, all those rooms, lives
impeccable for being thoughtlessly pulsating.
Sometimes, when many taps are running,
I wake enough to count my fingers
and feel for the windows in my skin.

Peering through one, I find you
curled up, a thumbprint
in my bed. It has been five years
but it is always high noon
and both of us ill-on-MC.
Outside the curtains, the workers
raise their gondola, to paint
us a new face.
They never look in.

Published in Burning Walls for Paper Spirits (2021)

Ann Ang is a literature educator and published writer best known as the author of Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012). She is the co-editor of the literary anthologies Poetry Moves (2020) and Food Republic (2020), and also the coordinating editor of PR&TA (Practice, Research & Tangential Activities) a new peer-reviewed journal of creative theory and practice in Southeast Asia. A keen birder, Ann also researches contemporary Anglophone writing from Southeast Asia and South Asia.

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Poems on the MRT is an initiative by the National Arts Council, in partnership with SMRT and Stellar Ace. Produced by Sing Lit Station, a local literary non-profit organisation, this collaboration displays excerpts of Singapore poetry throughout SMRT’s train network, integrating local literature into the daily experience of commuters. Look out for poems in English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil in trains on the East-West, North-South and Circle Lines, as well as videos created by local artists and featuring local poets in stations and on trains. The Chinese, Malay, and Tamil poems are available in both the original languages and English. To enjoy the full poems, commuters may read them on go.gov.sg/potm.

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