Two out of three
after Sarah Russell
If I had three lives, I’d set them up
like an experiment. In the first
I keep it simple: childhood sweethearts
without complication, which makes
for a nice and slightly tedious powerpoint
at our Gardens by the Bay wedding.
Placidly but with some difficulty I birth
three children, then we move to Australia.
There you mellow and I sharpen.
I write poems on occasion and tell people
it’s a hobby. We indulge each other.
And summers before dawn birds
race shrieking over glaucous fields.
In the second our story unfolds like
nesting dolls of unease. It still begins in
childhood, but here we are hampered
by personality and circumstance.
We break up as teenagers and I marry
someone else. You’re nearly engaged
when you turn up at the baby shower.
The baby grows and my marriage ends,
you make choice after choice all of which
go nowhere. And here we are again —
up to this point I disdain the evidence
of my body, but you teach me otherwise.
Economy of motion. It had to be you,
who knew me before everything
that made me wise happened.
Then, again, we come apart like clouds.
You call it fate and I call it stupidity.
I plod on with the writing, which is
neither hobby nor career, just a tree
that keeps growing in ludicrous soil.
You remain lodged inside me like the
thorn in my thigh, flesh grown plump
and dark over an old wound.
In the third I am careful to be happy.
I leave you after childhood and never
return to the same country. I never marry.
I pad around my cottage in vintage
nightgowns and drink wine at readings,
some of which are mine. Modest acclaim here
and no perpetuation of generational sins.
How delicious it is to write now in peace
and listen to the bald scuttling of insects.
Some weekends I enjoy a man I don’t love,
then wave goodbye distracted — see
the spider in the porch corner and her
conjurations, relentless and triangular. Here
time spins patiently on its axis
without sound.
Lisabelle Tay is a Singaporean writer and poet. Her poetry appears in Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere; her debut pamphlet was Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). Her fiction appears in Sine Theta Magazine and elsewhere, and she is currently a virtual writer-in-residence with the National Centre for Writing.
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