Samuel Lee (b. 1992)

1. BIOGRAPHY

2. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

3. SELECTED POEMS

SELECTED POEMS

Argument

How does one put it? Once there were handwritten recipes on the
fridge, and then there were none. Overnight the door became a
blank page humming in the moonlight. and then you were gone.

I spilled a measure of flour and thought of you in the dust-storm.
This is my itinerary: after laughter. darkness, then light. I am told
you are now everywhere, in the trees, the rain, etc., and still I wait
stubbornly by the stove for you to appear as a blue ghost.

Outside. I watch absurdity pile up against absurdity and yet believe
in the materiality of the world. I press down into cookie dough like
I’m burying the dead. I press down into wet earth like I only have my
fingers left.

First World Grocery Shopping

hail the marys of toa payoh
especially you miss chia with the
fruit and the expired safra membership
wear your black wig whisper good morning
into the diseased ears of your neighbour’s dog

the day is turning stale your plastic bag
of lemons blinking in your hands sweating their dew
into dark shapes announcing through their
waxen skin this is a memory we are your songs
go bake a tart

now honda civics rush out of the PA system for their
numbered asses are parking in the wrong places and their
daughters are late for ballet and what are you doing
like the pietà holding a loaf of white bread
and weeping by the cake display?

automation has made cheesecake readily accessible
to every household in the nation state one enters the
shopping bag
one your knock onto the floor a boy in a bright blue t-
shirt points at you and gawks and hides behind his
grandfather

babies are eating flies in the heat babies are tasting iron
in their gums
your wig droops slightly your fridge no longer hums
in the right key
yes the meek shall inherit the earth
and we will celebrate with bespoke cocktails

Ideology

Standing on a park bench
a boy declares his war on love
and tries to kiss every passing stranger

because the action, having gone through
a series of pointless and random transactions,
would have as much meaning as leftovers
slow dancing in a microwave.

Love is ideology, he chants,
and our shackles eat at our ankles.

Farther away, a balloon animal explodes
in a child's rose-blossom face. Its petals withdraw
into a tight bud of fear and profound longing.

There are only two things on my mind:
how mild the day has been
and how slowly the sun edges its way
down the gaps in the blocks of flats.

Walking beneath the trees, I recall the happiness
my best friend carved onto his face,
with a flint, saying, Yes I have a new girlfriend,
naming this conflation of duty and embarrassment,
conquest and consumerism,
Love, even if it seemed a catalogue
of various disasters to come.

Meanwhile on the television screen
a news presenter, dizzied by passing time,
laughs and reshuffles her papers, and I, too, saw myself
reordering speech to profess something neutral and pleasing.

We pronounce the names of things
vainly anticipating the slightest possibility
that we can slide our fingers down their contours,
understand their shape, manage desire.
We fill them with desecration, colouring them,
making them whole.

by Samuel Lee
from A Field Guide to Supermarkets in Singapore (2016)

BIOGRAPHY >