POETRY

  • Against the Wilderness

    WONG PHUI NAM

    For months, the sky was pale copper, withholding rain,
    firing the fields into fused beds of clinker.
    A subterranean kiln reduced standing grain and grass
    to fibre, snakes and mudfish

  • THE IMMORTALITY OF NOTHING and other poems

    CECIL RAJENDRA

    On one nothing-
    much happening
    day, a wandering
    vole sidled up
    to me to whisper:

  • STATEMENT

    LATIF KAMALUDDIN

    Mistakes
    Forgone Conclusions
    Misapprehensions
    Misconceptions
    Rituals
    Man Bodies
    Trance Hypnosis

  • Thoughts On Our Tongues

    YEE HENG YEH

    What we’ve inherited is their language—
    not the one they spoke, no,
    but the truer one,
    the one that lay under the one they spoke,

  • BOOK-DATE AT A CAFE IN MUAR and other poems

    JACK MALIK

    three slices of marbled cake;
    a bottle of nostalgia-flavoured
    local orange soda
    —we gorge all of the yellow warm lights
    & the cool estuary’s breeze the night
    offered, feeding our love.

  • Love Across the Causeway

    JUDITH HUANG

    Instant sparks
    You striding down the corridor
    after your comedy set
    You killed it.
    I say.
    To my delight you take the seat right next to me
    and before the night is over
    you ask me out.

  • Leavings – A Poetry Series

    MOHAN AMBIKAIPAKER

    Mutes circumambulate the city of
    mud, whose people of the past are
    knockoffs
    sold in back-lanes & after the
    bribe, counterfeiters hustle
    compendiums of porn

  • kami yang kekal (after Usman Awang’s 'Kambing Hitam' and GE15)

    SOOK JIN ONG

    tertulis dan terujar perasaan sebelum our ballots bloom
    lima belas kepeluangan pakcik penjual, puan pencerita, pelajar-pelajar
    with a finger inked intimately, we made a mark on each other.

  • The world is not masculine

    DANO CHOW

    hitherto modern man has only reiterated
    masculinity, sowing enlightenment
    upon man who do not ask for it

    as in the first dealings between man
    and sultan

  • Monsoon winds and other poems

    DAVID TNEH

    I feel the tropical winds
    caressing my face,
    like soft kisses
    blown from pouting lips.

    The winds bring the rains,
    and they creep slowly with
    the blankets of
    damp clouds and dark

  • From the heart of the rainforest

    ANGELINA BONG

    Bats dance in dragon moves
    across the skies leaving Deer Cave deep
    in the rainforest hunting in packs
    of millions. I was one of the hornbills
    who left for the land of the tigers strapped
    with the White Rajah’s tongue searching

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