A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two poems by Christian Yeo

Christian Yeo, Singapore

 

Mars

 

‘Mars will come to fear my botany powers.’

—Mark Watney, The Martian

 

Despite its redness, 

Mars is a cold planet. 

 

We cannot return now, not 

when our planet is burning 

 

with male apologies, floods

spilling like shared intimacy.

 

Do not mistake the silence 

of our forests for comfort—

 

they died with things unsaid, 

branding their throats with bile. 

 

Mars is still bigger than I

imagined, the anthropocene 

 

distant, thought experiment left too

late for the timeliness of empathy. 

 

With notes of mutual longing, my

children play in an extemp sandbox,

 

the clarity of our slow burning 

extraction too astringent for their

 

innocence to bear. Even so, I

cannot ask you to take me back.


The last gardeners

  

New one in the garden today,

talking silt to the old one. 

In every Monday, Friday,

clearly an inept addition.

 

Unused to the wetness 

of used soil, the hole at the 

bottom of the watering gun

dribbles through tape.

 

Only in fragments:

after the old one teaches 

boldness, he waters 

me with gatling rhythm, 

 

batters my lemongrass 

so that they grow into 

their metaphors. I have seen 

the old one, I have seen him. 

 

I have felt his fingers curl up

gently beneath my skin, his sweat 

dissolving into my fibres. 

He feeds me by the granule, 

 

arranges them as pebbles 

in the soakspray of sun.

Boy, listen to the earth. 

I feel the new one’s ear, 

 

pressed like he’s eavesdropping. 

Rolled eyes, trembled cheeks.

The old one’s sleight of hand:

I loosen in verse, knowing 

 

the rituals of my own wake. 

Feel the fresh pivot of palms, 

know their grief before I see 

it, roaring for dams to burst.

 

Christian Yeo is a final-year Singaporean law undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. His poetry has been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ethos Books' This is not a safety barrier, the Eunoia Review, the jfa human rights journal, 6'98's Redefinitions, Notes, and ZETEO Magazine, among others. His work is forthcoming in [Insert] Zine, won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize in 2019, and was long-listed for the Sykes Prize 2021.

Love yourself

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