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Discursions
Aaron Lee

On a train winding to the enclosure of the west
where they say everything must one day end,
the dubious sounds of the city crowd in each time
the doors open: shoes shuffle in, out, make no mind
of their misdeeds or of common grace, phones beep
while a girl thumbs the dark blue fringe of her shawl.
Your lips shape the name of the station stop just before
the doors decline your exit without so much as a qualm.
You glimpse the lights palpitate above the platform seats.
Now we pass fields where, in the ebb of evening, children
flee into that good night. What Love enacts such pictures
in a story written for our sake, discards the drafts
still unread and recalls them the very next day,
makes all our promises for a debt no one can pay?

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inspired by a child, just before national day 6 august 2002
Aaron Maniam

It takes starts, stumbles, stammers
Before words finally burst
Through the barriers of baby babble
She waves the red-white flag, gurgling
'Sing - Ah - Pore ... hear ...
Lion ... roar ..'

Syllables swell with newness
The corners of her curious smile
Propped by the unfamiliar feel 
Of language on the tongue 

Enough to make one wonder 
If patriotism and belonging
Whatever the time or place

Can ever find more coherent shape
Than these halting pronouncements

Or if, like language and love 
Such attachments are best left 
To the stutters of a child—
The joy and unfamiliarity 
Of a new word
Written on the face

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New Game Plus
Adeline Loh

I'm starting my life over in autumn 
when the world is most still and frail.
I know enough, now. I'll never come up 
short again. If I must make things 
up to avoid saying that I've been caged, 
then so be it. See, I stood under a maple tree, 
searching out a gust of wind that would shake 
down the branches and deliver a shroud 
of falling leaves upon me. I wanted just 
that, after having prayed at so many shrines 
with my leaden guilt that felt like greed.
Even the grey and brittle pile of leaves by my feet, 
swept and shaped into a heart, was something 
I wanted to keep. An extra lifeline lying 
within reach. Later, I came to resent 
all the gods I implored to see reason 
and my despair. That none of them relieved 
me is a slight I'm not willing to forgive now.
No matter, I made it here without faith.
When the wind loosened more leaves 
for my picking, I looked up and was startled 
to see that the tree and I were standing right 
by a public bathroom all along. Almost as trifling 
as my own lofty callings for a grander life.
Gods, are you seeing this leaf I found?
I'm staking my ruses on all seven lobes 
of a brilliant red maple leaf that had barely 
known it was dying before it happened.
I'm here now, waiting to catch the wind again.
I'm saying, I want to live.
I want to be sure 
that there's something I'm good for.

Adeline Loh (1998–2025) is a writer from Singapore. She has a BA (Hons) in Literature from Yale-NUS College and a MA (Research) in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University. Her poems have been published in journals such as sinθ and The Madrigal, and were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New Poets anthology. dream girl, loading is the author’s posthumous debut in print.

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homecoming
Alvin Pang

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Visit to the Yakult Factory, 1995
Amanda Chong

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Transit
Ang Shuang

Serangoon, 2000s 

Back then, car rides meant watching the cranes 
at work—giraffes gliding across black tar, 
woodpeckers gnawing away at steel bark. 
Ma said they were building the impossible:
a circle and a line, all at once. When we moved
the din dissolved. Years evaporating like pink cotton 
on tongue. Buried in books and bangs and boys,
even when the zoo sank I did not flinch. Soon
the animals fled, migrating towards an eternal summer;
I would only find their tracks a decade later. There,
in the sticky center of the crowd, I saw 
how a circle, a restless swell of infinity, 
is both the start and finish line.

Ang Shuang is the author of How to Live With Yourself (2022), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been published in Wildness, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and more.

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Becoming an HDB Flat
Ann Ang

Riding the lift up,
I grow as tall as you
and emerge, sixteen stories
above our bricked-in horizon.
My face is one of many flat-roofs,
dish-eyed with water tanks.

Both of us exhale the sky 
which, at one o'clock
is sweating white, and up our flanks
shiver the sounds of school buses returning.
Children slap their chalk-shoes at my ankles. 
A mynah shrieks. That's my beauty mole.

I bristle with laundry and potted pandan. 
I smell my pits
where mattresses are left to sun
and wheeze humid TV static.
There is bad gas from the ninth-floor karaoke.

Mostly I stand columned
on stumps over a void,
absent in the afternoon's slow wrinkling,
until someone hurls a bag of rubbish down my gullet: 
fifteen stories of swallowed tongue.
The effluvia of rush-hour footfalls
is a rash in my corridors.
I scratch and find blood
in flats, all those rooms, lives
impeccable for being thoughtlessly pulsating.
Sometimes, when many taps are running,
I wake enough to count my fingers
and feel for the windows in my skin.

Peering through one, I find you 
curled up, a thumbprint
in my bed. It has been five years
but it is always high noon
and both of us ill-on-MC.
Outside the curtains, the workers
raise their gondola, to paint
us a new face.
They never look in.

A published writer of poetry, fiction and literary criticism, Ann Ang is the author of Bang My Car (2012), a Singlish-English collection of short stories and the poetry collection Burning Walls for Paper Spirits (2021). Ann is also one of the founding editors of PR&TA.

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meta-public; an anxiety
bani haykal

bookmarks and bookmarks and bookmarks of going, marking, go to, going to bookmarks of yesterday and the libraries you, recall, submerged in time stamps and checkpoints, you of yesterday, forgetting, forgotten, hunched without, refocusing, recalling those bookmarks of bookmarks in bookmarks and there, metadata, more data, without punctuations, a punctuating, puncturing a, puncture poverty, feed us information, of information (does iTown dream of digital apples?) and mouths wide open, browsing through, browsing, brown nosing gods of information, bookmarks are joss sticks to the omnimath machine, pray, never in pain, never remorse, never negate, never again would we disobey the stranger with our names, bold, underlined, hyperlinked, pink or blue, Helvetica in scriptures, ingrained, incessant and intimate, our love for prosthetics, digital plastics, lubricated and bookmarks and bookmarks and bookmarks of memories jolts us back in frame. here. what are you listening to? here. lolcat got my tongue. here. bookmarks our best friends. here. memories feeding the economy of repetition, of repetition, of bookmarks and bookmarks and here, and repetition there, here, stop creeping me out, here, with braintag encryption guard your brain, encrypt the tomes of your being, fencing the woulds and the shoulds where the could haves are stashed away, incognito amidst the bland yet harrowing tunnels of impropaganda, stop, scaremonger you, stop, here, Smart universe another silo and limitless to you is limited to me, us, we who then feed the economy of repetition, of repetition, of precipitation of bits and bits and bobs of things of details you've sewn on our curtains of imagination, hah! beyond it no window, never windowed the hauntings of tomorrow, excess, excess in the absence of filters, it makes, here, abscess, here, now, data, big data, inflating as we speak, the illustrious spectre of capital omnipotent, we, really? we, no, maybe, really are, bookmarks of bookmarks of bookmarks in the grand narrative of the things we'll never learn, the things we'll never see and the things we hope to do re mi, for so far and inasmuch as we should resist any (veiled?) oppressing structures, developing self-initiated floodgates (temporary autonomous schools?) as a strategy to educate ourselves amidst an economy of bookmarks and bookmarks and bookmarks of human desires and beliefs, that there, yes, is the bread and butter of our sociopolitical survivalism, of which without addressing invisible potential anxieties, insecurities, we'll be back in depression before war begins.

bani haykal experiments with text + music. As an artist and musician, his work revolves around human-machine relationships / intimacies, examining and reflecting on how tools and technologies have shaped and continue to shape our experiences from commuting to communicating, navigating places and people.

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Declaration
Cheng Him

“Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honoured one” — Gautama Buddha

from behind the comfort delgro ah seng
kick down the door climb on top the
nearest honda phantom one time all
time faster than turf club fastest horse
fast until existence sediya until the
Singapore zoo inside the elephant
dont know why also start to cry until
all the kopitiam inside the uncle one
time all together up the ang ji kao
face the nearest exit PIE yum seng
until ah seng lao bu come out the taxi
behind say sorry to the uncle grab her
si ginah slap him back across the road
screaming what you think you doing?

Cheng Him is from Singapore, and is the author of Boh Beh Zhao.

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plato's dream of airports
Christine Chia

when you take the red-eye flight from singapore,
and descend into the air-conditioned caves of changi,

you marvel at how quiet and empty it seems,
and realise with absent-minded pride

that if plato ever dreamed of airports,
they would look like changi,

clinically opulent, the plush carpet
removing the dirt from your too-human shoes,

so that you can enter into clean dreams
of freedom like a form

without a body.

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On Bougainvilleas
Chrystal Ho

On the day the runways are out of commission, one could strip away the stretch of bougainvillea bushes, and the planes will have an alternative runway to land: straight, wide and barren. 

*

According to the National Parks Board, the bougainvillea “is extensively planted here because it flowers all year round in our local hot and wet weather conditions, and flowering is encouraged by controlling the amount of water and fertiliser that plants receive.” 

* 

In other words: to lay a garden, begin with a plan and a sturdy foundation. 

* 

These words don’t belong here: despite its abundance and perennial bloom, the bougainvillea is not native to this part of the tropics, though one could easily be forgiven for thinking of Singapore as a natural greenhouse for bougainvilleas. 

*

Cut / prune / cut / prune 

“He was, as NParks always said, our chief gardener. He would send a large number of proposals to them, some unworkable but most workable. Whenever I see the red bougainvillea on the overhead bridge, my heart moves up a tick… That was [him].”

* 

Years after first hearing the story, I learn about the ones transplanted into pots on wheels designed for a quick clearing. 

* 

The manner in which a petal stretches before tearing, with the pliability of something recently alive, like a baker stretching their dough to check for gluten formation —the windowpane test—though the baker will have the option of tossing their dough back onto the counter to continue kneading. 

* 

I, too, have a gardener I remember. A teacher who clipped daily away at the bush almost twice his height, coaxing it to become a brilliant fuchsia beacon by the drop-off point at school whenever a new semester began.

* 

In other words: it wasn’t red it wasn’t red it wasn’t him. 

* 

If what we call a petal is in fact a bract, then what is a garden but a garden? If we strip away the flowers and leaves and creepers and fertiliser, just how much concrete will be left behind? 

* 

The way we learn to overlook the bougainvillea: through some kind of window, day after day. 

* 

When the time comes, how will they strip down the palm trees that flank both sides of the expressway? 

* 

In truth, there is no real way to end this poem, only that no homecoming is ever complete without seeing the bougainvillea bushes that cleave the East Coast Parkway with their arrogant bloom: to one side, the rolling golf course; the other, the reclaimed beach.

Chrystal Ho is the author of Elsewhere, the Cosmos Cracks (AFTERIMAGE), a 2024 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize finalist. Her poetry and nonfiction, which explore our connections to the natural world, have been published in Portside Review, PR&TA, BiblioAsia, Manoa Journal, and Sine Theta Magazine, among others.

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Otter City
Cyril Wong

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Upsizing
Daryl Lim Wei Jie

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Construction
Gilbert Koh

They were building a subway
station right next to our block.
Most of the time, you could not see
the workers. They worked deep down below,
beyond the reach of light—
like so many termites carving
ceaseless secrets into the hidden parts
of a wooden house.

At noon, they emerged from tunnels,
blinked into the sudden sun.
After a quick meal, they lay
in the shade of void decks
and swiftly folded themselves into sleep.

They became so still and quiet
you might have thought them dead.

Then a small breeze came, and one of them
stirred slightly, though he did not wake.
He would not have known it,
if you had come close enough to watch him breathe—
the way his chest slightly rose
                                       and fell,
then, almost like a miracle,
slightly rose
                 and fell again.

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Gwee Li Sui

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Rituals 
Izyanti Asa'ari 

Biting into pumpkin seed, 
it is jasmine that I taste.
I had been expecting salt, 
nut and earth.
The scent of these evenings 
are an insistent thing.
Sinking into yellow chrysanthemum, 
fingertips dipping in gold.
We are folding a treasury of ingots 
for your grandfather, and the heat 
gathering from held breath 
will smoulder and sigh.

In our funerals, 
little gold is involved.
There is white cotton, 
crumbled mothball, 
jasmine string.
We send off our dead with flowers, 
petals bruised and picked apart.
We wash them in our homes, 
the bedroom, the kitchen, 
or wherever the tub may fit.
My hands will unfold past flesh, 
tap water cool through our fingers 
as we hoist on command, 
to rinse, turn, clean, caress.
We will wrap you tight, snug, 
you will be held.
We will sink you, our beloved,
deep into soft soil, 
though these days, 
orange clay.

There are things in common: 
old fracture lines, 
and freshly exposed nerve.

Izyanti Asa’ari is a writer and designer. Her poetry explores how narratives, behaviours and built environments shape our inner lives, the gestures the body makes in response to place, memory and myth. Her works have previously appeared in New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Books, 2022), The Opening Act (Layl Ash-Shayr, 2024) and most recently, blood/work (AFTERIMAGE Press, 2026).

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Season Changes
Janelyn Dupingay

Do not make yourself comfortable 
In the blanket of coldness,
For you might miss the warmth 
Coming from the steaming hope 
Spreading in every vineyards.

Do not close your windows 
For you might not be able to see, 
The beauty of a new bloom 
Decorating every gardens 
Bringing the scent of a new world.

Do not focus counting feathers 
Dropping from the mighty eagle 
But gather and sew them, 
Wrapping it around your body 
To have the courage to soar high.

Do not close your eyes
Feeling the gentle wind of fall.
You might miss the explosion of light 
Silently painting the east
Bringing a splendid hue of dayspring.

Do not settle on your doubts and fears 
And lock in uncertainties
But leave your doors widely open 
To witness the surrender of autumn
Unveiling the promises of springtime.

Janelyn Dupingay is an organising member of the Migrant Writers of Singapore and is the author of the poetry collection Language Of My Heart. She is also an avid textile artist whose embroidery works can be found on Facebook under Threadure Embroidery & Craft and on Instagram: @jane25_lyn

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1991
Jason Wee

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Corridor, Bukit Merah
Koh Buck Song

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In His Other House
Koh Jee Leong

In this house there is no need to wait for the verdict of history
And each page lies open to the version of every other.
—Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, In Her Other House

In my other house too, books fill the floor-to-ceiling shelves,
not only books on stock markets, seven habits, ghost stories,
but also poetry, Arthur Yap, Cyril Wong, Alfian Sa’at,
and one who moved away and who wrote Days of No Name.

My father comes home from the power station. When rested
(and this is how I know this is not real) he reads to us again,
for the seventh time, Philip Jeyaretnam’s Abraham’s Promise
in a quiet voice, unbroken by a frightened young supervisor.

When he closes the book, my dead grandfather stirs heavily
and says a word or two, that really says he has been listening.
And my beloved, knowing his cue, jumps up from the couch
to clear the dishes, for, he says, dishes don’t wash themselves.

Softly brightened by a feeling I do not hurry to identify,
I move to the back of him and put my arms around his waist.
His muscles twitch like the needle on a motorboat’s dashboard
as he turns a bone china plate against a rough cotton cloth.

The light from the window looks like a huge, blank sea.
In this other house there will be time to fill it but right now
the bell intones in silver, and here, on a surprise night visit,
are my sister and her two daughters coming through the door.

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Samsui Girls
Laura Jane Lee

“Our lives went by like that. What can we hope for? No family here. Cannot regret… already came here. No regrets, once we made up our minds to come.” — An Immigrant’s Story: With Sweat, Tears and Toil – The Samsui Women (Mediacorp News and Channel News Asia, 1995).

our lives went by like that. what can we hope for?

a cent worth of food and a little bit of sky. 

the luxury of a moment’s reprieve.

a packet of tobacco and papers to roll a life out of this.

tomorrow the lorry will come again, and we will build

what needs to be built. no family here. cannot regret. 

you think you know what we’re made of?

we’ll tell you—you do what you can to survive.

god forbid we be young and want things for ourselves.

the girls we drown in the sun to give you old women.

and if i tell you about the shape of my loneliness,

what would you see?

is this not survival?                 doing what i can to dream?

Laura Jane Lee is a Singaporean poet and teacher of Hong Kong origin. She is an awardee of the Newdigate Prize, and she placed 2nd in the Bridport Prize. Her work has been featured in Cordite, Ambit, and Bellingham Review, among others. Recent works include flinch & air (Out-Spoken Press, 2021).

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The Secret Lives of Leaves
Marc Nair

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Roti Chatter
Ng Yi-Sheng

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Pooja Nansi

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Dear Bukit Batok
Rodrigo Dela Pena Jr.

today I honor how my hours revolve 
around your axis: insistent beeping

of delivery trucks come early morning, 
a quick jaunt and jog at the Nature Park

by night. Like you, I try to make the most 
out of being in the periphery,

the margins where it is easy to be 
given the cold shoulder, the outright yawn

for the meagre gifts you offer. I stake 
no claim over you, landscape born from

quarried low-slung hills, yet how kindly 
you have opened, unlatched the gate for me

to cross. I walk your streets, scattered with dry 
leaves, the air rich with the scent of cut grass,

and my heart quickens to find myself 
in this darkening light, this clearing.

Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr. is the author of Tangere (University of the Philippines Press, 2021) and Aria and Trumpet Flourish (Math Paper Press, 2018). Born in the Philippines, he has been based in Singapore since 2011.

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I AM OTTER
Shivram Gopinath

I RETURN TO BIG-CITY LIFE IN A GREENER, CLEANER SINGAPORE 

I PRETEND TO BE A DOLPHIN BY JUMPING IN AND OUT OF FOUNTAIN AT RIVER VALLEY SHOW FLAT

I FEAST ON KOI AND LUOHAN FISH AFTER SNEAKING INTO HOUSES ALONG JALAN KAYU

I TRAIN WITH S'PORE FOOTBALL TEAM ON GEYLANG FIELD 

ELDERLY MAN ATTACKED ALONG KALLANG RIVER, WARKS OTHERS OF POTENTIAL DANGER

I CROSS ROAD DIAGONALLY FROM FUNAN TO ST ANDREWS CATHEDRAL A LA SHIBUYA ROAD JUNCTION

I GANG FIGHT AND CHANT POEM IN CANAL THAT CUTS THROUGH BRADDELL

I, RIPPED, AT CONEY ISLAND, FLEX BICEP WHILE CHOMPING DOWN ON MY CATCH

MAN THOUGHT DEATH WAS NEAR AS MY PACK OVERPOWERED HIM IN SINGAPORE PARK

MEET ME, WHO RAIDED A SPA DURING A CORONAVIRUS SHUTDOWN, SPARKING OUTRAGE 

I IGNORE COURT-ORDERED HALT TO ADMIRE KAWS:HOLIDAY EXHIBITION AT MARINA BAY

SENTOSA COVE RESIDENTS PUT UP FENCES TO FEND ME OFF

I DEFEAT MARINA RIVALS AGAIN IN KALLANG BASIN CLASH

TREATED LIKE ROYALTY AS ISTANA GUARDS HALT TRAFFIC JUST FOR ME

l EXERCISE AT CONDO POOL BEFORE MAKING GRAND ESCAPE THROUGH MAIN GATE

I FROLIC OUTSIDE MUSTAFA CENTRE, LOOKING FOR A PERMANENT HOME

Shivram Gopinath is a poet, performer, and two-time Singapore National Poetry Slam champion. His debut collection, Dey (Ethos Books, 2025), refracts migrant identity and systemic absurdity through Tamil cinema tropes, and has been shortlisted for the 2026 Singapore Literature Prize.

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Question
Tania De Rozario

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The Feather Lights
Teo Xiao Ting

Even if the concrete floor floods haphazard, 
even if the forest dissipates into hungry leaves, 
you can fly with the dream wing of a bird 
stretching over the mountains' back.

Even if the sun drips, dips a gliding departure, 
even if frost melts from your lash, a delayed warmth, 
you can wrap a cotton embrace threadbare 
around a miniature sun, your heart.

Always
I find a dwelling place, 
conversation whispered 
into a fist, closing 
into monsoon. It arrives 
as a feather, 
a defiant insistence 
for another tongue, another 
breath to be held, flight.

Teo Xiao Ting is currently pursuing a Master’s in Human Systems Intervention at Concordia University, Montreal, where their research explores LARPs as a mode of social transformation. They are devoted to sprouting worlds that are more joyous, habitable, and honest. Presently, her offerings include workshops, one-to-one therapy sessions, and arts writing. (txting.space)

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The Seer
Theophilus Kwek

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A Guide to the Extirpated Birds of Singapore
Tse Hao Guang

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taking appropriate action
Wahid Al Mamun

or – to break free from a life of italics. to add
your name to the dictionary. to tell friends
where your parents came from. to stop 
writing love poems written to some dead poet. 
to turn down an invitation for a color run.
to not shave. to learn that cashmere is woven
with blood. to discard your sweater. to be proud
of your name, singular, yours. zayn malik, sort of.
to watch the cricket world cup. to add footnotes,
apologetic at first but louder, in bold,
over time. to not right-click on red lines.
to pray, but only when you need to. to fast.
to wear kurtas for eid. gulab jamun. to 
ask your mother for translations. to love
the inscrutable. to live between the lines.
to stride up to an immigration line. to speak 
with your accent. to stick your chin to the sky.

Wahid Al Mamun (b. 1997) is a poet and Ph.D. student in Anthropology at McGill University. He grew up in Singapore and lives in Montréal. What God Took Your Legs Away is his debut in print.

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with love, eventually
Yashmita D/O Ananthan

when you've been swallowed and the summer beckons you
to sit idle on the inside of a whale's mouth, agonisingly whole,
for a while there's nothing to do 
but kick at its tongue. but then
the outside is no better; the birds flap their wings 
too loud and chirp on towering, unreachable trees 
to mock your agony. okay, 
okay. what shall we do here? 
what do you do with a sad, wet dog
in captivity? bring it to the warmest part of the house, 
the living room, and pat it down with a towel. once it's dry, 
we feed it whatever we have:
the bag of emergency kibble at the top of the shelf 
you can only reach on your tippy toes will do 
for now, and we'll trust that flesh will come 
tomorrow. notice how I didn't say to neuter it? 
we are not angry at its desire, nor the weight of the loss 
it carries with each step. what makes a dog a dog 
is its willingness to become a shadow. we are actually not all that 
different, but what makes you you is that you take the ache 
with your human hands and tear down the walls of a shelter 
to build a house, 
and with love, eventually, 
a home.

Yashmita D/O Ananthan is a poet and undergraduate student in English and Creative Writing, and Sociology at Murdoch University. She grew up in Singapore and now lives in Perth. Her poems dwell in family, friendship, intimacy, memory, and the body. D/O (AFTERIMAGE, 2026) is her debut poetry collection in print.