Cheng Tim Tim, Hong Kong
1.
“The day a calf was cut in half by a propeller,
white dolphins poked at its remains
as if it was still swimming,
the sea, its CPR, its heartbeat.”
Where did I read that—
most mammals can't fully process death:
some mothers carry the child's body
in the wild until the day
they decide to only carry their grief?
2.
Sally and Rex told us tales on their boat,
the couple who gave up past lives on land,
an act of rebellion that somehow
honoured the tradition of fishing families.
Their decks used to be the marketplace
for daughters, catches and fishing songs,
their categories defined by the distance
they're away from the shore: salty tunes
from the deep or shallow sea.
3.
“Some fisherwomen who hated seafood
knew their catch by heart,
by the strength and angle it bit
into their hooks. By the same logic,
they tied their children to a pole
when the sea was hungry—their husbands
too dead to do so, limbs tangled
with mooring lines, drawn in, unawares.”
4.
There's a reason why, in Cantonese,
sheung ong, getting to the shore,
could mean getting an apartment,
which is to say, you were settled.
5.
Now that their deck was used for parties and tours,
Sally and Rex were amphibians again.
Some nights they rewarded themselves
by sailing nowhere, singing a pop song
inspired by their own stories.
6.
“We'll be driven out of our sailing routes
when these islands link for a metropolis,”
Sally and Rex told us. “One day, here,
the sea, our heart, will be no longer.”
7.
Falcons circled overhead, a buzzing
drone among them. Here, on these islands,
butchers processed no livestock
but histories. Vacation houses stood
hollower than prisons and asylums.
This water kept changing hands. It began
where our cities inched into sand.
Between the words sink and sunk,
there's a vision without us: our new skyline
might look the same, if not more insane,
but we would not be in the picture
the way we never were.
Cheng Tim Tim is a poet and a teacher from Hong Kong, currently reading the MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems are in Berfrois, diode, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She was nominated Best Small Fiction by SAND Journal in 2020. She is working on chapbooks which explore Hong Kong’s landscapes, as well as desire and rituals through the lens of tattooing. Find her on IG @mymothercalls or Twitter @timtimtmi