White Hot Forever
Karen Leong
(she/her)
Karen Leong is a writer of poetry, prose, and nonfiction. Plucking inspiration from reclamation and desire, her works mainly involve Hong Kong, Women of colour, and her lived experience in straddling both. Outside of writing, Karen daylights as a model and creative when her mulch-like thoughts have run dry.
1.to halve a home
I once rolled chestnuts away
from the house with well watered eyes
where my grandfather laid his head and
breathed into the cool brown pane,
listen— it has started to hurt.
the stomach is first to go
the pancreas short- sputtered
when i am left gouged
by the way pain dilates in slow, thorny bloom
I become
speck-frozen in amber
I am not so old now to have forgotten
one summer my mother stayed
seizing quietly inside the brown house
gutting fish at my father’s side
I tacked myself onto his bait:
hear me?
everything was going to be the same.
later I’d return
same country home bricked
ruddy with coughs
I am on pulpy growth
chestnuts ground asphalt
under my feet
a flowering pain
the mass of it choking me her or us?
leadening in my grandmother’s eyes
it is not an unkind house that left me strung up
like a doily,
like a tender faced epithet,
like the driveway raining down with hard old stones.
2. the long march
It has started to rain,
puddle in helpless antiquated ways.
cheers ghosting on my lips a
soliloquy so sweet
how long do I pretend this is elsewhere?
if it is more or less the same
foresight breaks like shrapnel
on the soft of my skull
It has been raining for the last twenty days
we are hewn into our fear
we are more or less the same
I cannot do my laundry
moss and mould dance on tarmac dewy
the bend of winded trees
commit me to memory
now stretches lithe
now has pleated folds
there is dancing and dilated eyes
and shelled cities swayed
soon it’ll be march again
see not much has changed
when we seismic ants scuttle
down hot wood
fear one another
crowdy is the tempest
a place to look for shade
twenty-three beckons in the
same same that will be my march,
dripping dulcet with flowers
and the knife kiss of rain
3. White hot forever
That it would take a visitation across sea
to get to me again
In the same careful,
not to wet my head
five summers being blonde
taught letting go —
not to capsize.
Who are we to think we are beautiful?
floating in the embers
of the whittling day
the world engulfs me in swathes
last week I opened my thumb on a can.
ruck up my skirt to find
a suckling monster
making off in the dead of a silvery night
how bright the sun seeps
into the crease of my thighs
into, mary oliver whispers;
The family of things
I parry the blows of return
meanwhile the sail tilts
meanwhile I want to make a home
in the faces yet to nick
stowed in a blinding place
where they can glint hot in the
flush of my hips
where
all my life I will be sweet