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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)
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