ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Tan Tuck Ming is an essayist, poet, and an MFA graduate at the University of Iowa. Born in Singapore and raised in New Zealand, his current work is interested in the shifting structure of the family, especially in the context of migration, displacement, and welfare.
Genealogy of the Wet Market
When the chest of the pig is split open,
an uprising of chrysanthemum occurs only to you.
The decisive blade like your shining father,
who, in his absence, has always been
a projection of fluorescent light. A father is
a man with a cleaver
in a computer chair, inspecting
an Excel spreadsheet or a lonesome carcass,
the axial slicing a transformative magic
distinctive of most freelance butchers.
The administration of when pig bone becomes Pork Rib
— a distinction as lovely as tongue, thigh.
What catches your eye is
not the protagonism of prestigious cuts
but an orphan note of fat on the blooming
floor you develop deep feelings for.
It is clench-shaped, like
a lull, shallow pocket where spareness
goes to evacuate the earth. Timidity blunts
you from exchanging introductions. You worry
that this fascination is not mutual and
it is not. The glimmer of a knowing thing
is soft, like a fable’s music. Pig killed
yesterday, the butcher reminds. And there is no
grasping toward humiliation. Only one of
you musing the neighboring blood
as if corrective, as if glue.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
