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Moving People With Words

Poems on the MRT

Apartment 10C by Samuel Caleb Wee

 

The first snows arrived with us that winter.
You might not remember.
You slept the whole way through
as our train browsed the North Sea,
entering the sleet from the stops
to the tune of a Nordic intoning,
nästa station.

-

Perhaps her heart lurches when she discovers
the mistake of the single bedroom. The leg
of a bed gives out that night, and she wakes
to the clatter of one, meeting every piece
of furniture in the room as he crosses
to his lover below.

-

Awkward, the winter metaphor,
to say that loneliness soughs
through the body, whistling, wind
opening her through to bone.

Much easier to explain trust, tea
of cloud, desert of water, billowing
through the glass tea pot, though
she sequesters herself like a sachet.

-

The tip of a triangle holds the whole base together.
In her absence, the hotpot lid falls from grace,
and the bedroom door breaks
the heart of the apartment.

When she returns, she finds him under
a blanket in the sitting room, unkempt,
unshaven. You look homeless, she says.

--

(There used to be a picture
at the end of this book.

It’s the one you took that late spring,
standing far behind your roommates
as they met the bank of the river.

I have taken that picture out.
It is now where all unsaid words dwell:
in the muteness at the heart of all things.)

-

He put his face against the window.
He saw the wrongness of it all.
He’d climbed in, once, when he’d forgotten his key,
but the lock opened from the inside then.

Now shelf empty of book.
The sill naked of flower.
The table in the sensible spot,
in the middle, and the family

Arabic instead of Singaporean.
A real family, even.

Published in https://everything.is (2024)

Note: This is the most updated version published in 2024. Some lines have been removed, including a line from the excerpt as printed in the MRT panels.

Samuel Caleb Wee is an Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University whose creative work has appeared in publications such as Esquire, QLRS, and OF ZOOS. He previously co-edited this is how you walk on the moon (Ethos Books, 2016), an anthology of experimental short fiction. His first book of poetry, https://everything.is, was published in 2024 by AJAR Press.

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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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