Poetry

Translated from Malay by Muhammad Haji Salleh 

Memorabilia It is raining everyday in Douala // the temperature is peaking // today is not a good day to…

Return   I don’t know how we go on, some nights, how I live – I get antsy and want…

Polar The Russian poet said in Paris she felt like an iceless polar bear.   One drifts on a flow,…

living in testing times. most testing times in one hundred years. pandemic sweeping through our world will wipe clean pages…

Before the forest was widowed, And postcards allayed the death of the Javan tiger, In the beginning were rhymes of…

At nightfall, I mould scraps of experiments into paper mash puddings and swallow two balls for dinner. Two is a…

My grandmother’s house in Johor was the place of my childhood as much as it was my mother’s. Once a…

Brother has a scar. It takes the shape of Africa on his slim chest. An accident of childhood, it is…

-  Not for Rudyard Kipling

My roots are in Manila — that's above Bali and    to the right of Bangkok. You might know the area. …

my tongue mutters a p at p at wa a poetry of brevity in acoustic effect it rolls clinks spits…

‘Only men?’ she speaks into the mass gathered at Satan’s gate to protest hell’s conditions. ‘Where are the women?’  …

We gather here and feel the weight of the world on our shoulders. It does not feel like we’ve inherited…

I write to tell you that the walls of my bones are made of contention and I am always situated…

I memorised the rhythm of your heart, almost inaudible but I heard you, a beating body inside a body being…