David Wong Hsien Ming (b. 1988)

SELECTED POEMS

Imagined Days

I am with you on Saturdays
watching you mop the floor too many times.

I am three thousand miles below you on Sundays
refusing to go to church.

On weekdays, we write. Your second book,
my first. I am kind to your drafts.

In June we get mom to sit through the flight to New York;
we repeat the twenty-block walk across the upper west side

to the museum with her, and her legs do not hurt.
So you plan for the Barcelona trip

you could not bring her on
when you were both young.

And you are both still young. Her lapses in memory
nothing that cannot be fixed with a little mahjong. 

Your cancer scare was just a scare.
You still run ten kilometers around Bishan every day.

On nights when you do not come back sweaty and triumphant,
I accept these apparitions as my own.

by David Wong Hsien Ming
from For the End Comes Reaching (2015)

 

SELECTED POEMS: "Potomac Tidal Basin" >