by Conan Tan
My mother says love is a light breeze,
quiet as cloud. She married a year younger
than I am now and once more
than I ever would. At dinner, she drapes
her skin across my father’s, helps him to
another bowl of rice. Says love is watching
her husband chew with his mouth open.
Watching the Sunday game past bedtime.
Loving a man is easy, all they want is soccer, beer,
and sex. Like all jokes, there’s a casual
truth to them. In this one, it’s her
yellowed voice like a warning sign. Funny how
trauma lives inside our hunger yet hides
in plain sight. Once, I made a home in a man’s
heart and found more body, more want than
give. I soaped and emptied my hands
but they were still holding too much hand.
So I know what it’s like to love a man,
to live inside his throat for years and never
hear him speak. To look at him
look at me like I was always my mother’s son.
Conan Tan (he/they) is a queer Singaporean Chinese writer. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, Beaver, HAD, SUSPECT, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and elsewhere. The winner of Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition, he is matriculating at Oxford University this fall. Find them on Instagram and Twitter @tmyconan.
Emerge Literary Journal 