Three Poems by Lisabelle Tay

Mangosteen Season

After Philodemus the Epicurean, trans. Sherod Santos

It’s the season of small-seeded mangosteens,
the season of lychees and orange-fleshed fruits,
of custard apples, of pungent nangka larger
and heavier than ostrich eggs, hiding sweet petals
from ripening, from consumption. Even so,
have you noticed how this year nothing’s changed?
How the boats circle, island to island, weighted
with freshly shaven boys posturing, some trying
not to cry, necks craning toward the next
two years of national service, some to die?
How their mothers do not yet know this, how they
are packing their sons’ leftovers carefully,
in old Tupperware, with all the weight of love?

John at the end of his days

grips a pen with crabbed hands gazes bewildered
at crabs hunched along a shore thinks to himself
Maybe you’ve got it wrong
It’s not so strange that you fell at his feet
as though dead he whom you loved the firstborn
of the dead Grief after all is a kind of failure
exile unending grief Who are you to offer
comfort? You are drowning
and survive via transmutation memory into
mystery and all your days swallowed
by a bitter tongue Your throat blazing
like the sun of his face swallowed now by snow
The white stone of your body worn smooth
with age translucent by isolation
through which all that is hidden will be revealed
With each revelation your head sheds its hair your skin covered
with old-person down like the hairs of winter fruit
shaken free by a gale Who is to say whether an angel
is embodied longing at the end of all knowledge
Who is to say if your enemies are this moment rejoicing
over open tombs left behind the mouth of the earth
your last recourse Now you are weeping and nourished
for a time and times and half a time by the thought
of a final bloody justice a sickle swung reaping across
the dying earth and the return of a city with walls
Now his face is before you beloved his words dry in your mouth:
Behold the sea is like glass Therefore repent

Three Stars

The smooth arc of a steel rule flicked over twice-ironed linen, white
as forgetting. The pale shell undersides of fingers pressing

on a glass-foot, pulling it millimetres towards coherence.
Such small beauties bloom behind my eyes as you educate me

on mise en place inside this heated dome, which seems to me a
cloche and we the limp sprout soon to moulder. Around us dogwood

is bristling. I thrill briefly at the setting—cold, besotted
precision—which after a moment diminishes. We too, I feel

are likewise diminished. My thighs tighten at the deferential
sweep of crisp napkin over my lap. My tongue dry as old bark.

***

There was a chef, you say, bright star of his generation. He
killed himself. He had not yet lost a star; he simply felt it

inevitable. In the bathroom someone slips me a warmed
towel, averting his eyes. It is right that he pretends no one

is crying over the sink. He is simply doing his job.
Now I place a quatrefoil wafer on my tongue, reap

the curdled fruit of my own fear; espuma is dissolving
into the table’s unseen roots. A candle is brought over

to our table, burning between us as something else once did.
Dark. Outside the black-bone trees draw water from the tired earth.

Lisabelle Tay is the author of Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021), which is her debut pamphlet. She lives in Singapore.