Three Poems by Tim Tim Cheng

The Tattoo Collector #5 (from CUTS: A Tattoo Lyric)

Strange how tattoos stay on mummies.
The flesh beneath dissolves
but the skin remains embalmed,
markings intact:

those brief, horizontal lines
charcoal-inked on Ötzi’s body,
unearthed from a glacier
five thousand years since death

by an arrow wound in his shoulder.
No one knows for sure
if the lines are medical or not
but today, slightly after his recovery,

you say you’ve decided
on plum blossoms and branches
along your legs, where rashes
sometimes bloom:

the tattooist must observe
your erratic dapples for hours
to design something lasting,
to capture your skin’s weather.

Skin. Me. (From CUTS: A Tattoo Lyric)

Surgeons’ Hall Museum

Here a black star that stops smudging was someone’s shoulder, now a waxy bookmark. Here a snake that hisses at its eternal reflection was someone’s chest. Laurel leaves anchor a boat between faded nipples. Hair floats around them in formalin. Here you fantasize about being skinned, hung whole in a glass box. Your thigh, a pantry of food tattoos, cracking with lines of a leather couch: ramen spilling from tumultuous soup, a blue, muscular mushroom, a pomegranate halved next to a grumpy-faced avocado drinking from a nonic pint. Here you are, of clothes, of skin, of sinews, of bones, of nothing away from other visitors, flipping the big book. Gratitude, in many hands, is incomplete. If you count people in jars too, the hall gets crowded. Here the more marked you are, the easier it is to identify
             you.

my love is bathing alone

his neck on porcelain
his thoughts beading
down his hair
his eyes his skin his dick
pink his dick tame
his slit his horse eye stares
at me glass is mist
he could be a good horse
the skin on his belly
creases along his muscle
definition that of love
my love is bathing alone
i watch myself watch this
stillness in milky water
it drips and i too
sometimes gravitate

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and a teacher from Hong Kong, currently based between Edinburgh and London. Her pamphlet Tapping at Glass (Verve, 2023) charts girlhood, multilingualism, and psycho-geography. Her poems appeared in POETRY, The Rialto, Ambit, and elsewhere. Her latest appearances include the Hidden Door festival, BBC Scotland, and Singapore Writers Festival. timtimcheng.com