Selected Work

          by Tammy Ho Lai-ming










          DINNER TABLE


          The two of you bellowed to each other in
          fiercest intellectual insults.

          An unsuccessful chaperone I was. I shut
          my eyes to listen to an orange horse gallop
          on, not too clumsily, a bed of golden-
          brimmed grass shooting north.

          Forks dueled with knives, glasses clinked
          and licked. Already? Back to the dining
          table, together you laughed, mouths open
          wide to park spaceships.

          Ever since I used that word 'love',
          both of you repeated it
          ad infinitum, adorned with other crude
          lexemes, as if all of a sudden a child
          was allowed to play with Daddy's lighter.


          THIS BE THE POSTCARD POEM


          I pretend to be a postcard poem,
          being denied the side of the stamp.
          (It's fenced.) Let the address be short--
          I hate fighting for space with a country
          name that is accidentally polysyllabic.

          The picture on the front is a deaf fly?
          a beggar? or a bowtie? Perhaps
          nonchalant bedcovers. (I know not
          what.) It's like a single eye peeping,
          edgily, at its lid.

          I hope the recipient likes this poem;
          and forgets (only just) that the man
          who sent it has nothing to say
          from afar, or nothing to sigh
          about, either.


          Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March, 2006), a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine and a co-founder of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (www.asiancha.com). More at www.sighming.com. (April 2008)


          If frames-incompatible, Click Lunarosity