Name: Michelle Lee Yan Yee

Class of 19
Residential College: Cendana
Email: michelle.lee@yale-nus.edu.sg

Cliffs of Moher
I boarded the bus at dawn,
taste of a dead language still on my tongue.
We rode on through the dark
till the light caught up with us,
strangers in our rowing locks,
blinking startled at the blinds.
Four hours later we turned a bend
and the sun crashed through the window
rippling madly across the waves.
Verb conjugations take flight
on a draft of fresh air,
my mouth an oh! of delight.
Vikings must have landed here long ago.
Having walked for miles,
I dangle my legs off a precipice.

Wild grasses turn into postcard drafts;

I dream, head echoing with indolent summer heat.
Nothing is here to spoil this,
nothing disturbs the gestalt a stone that teeters over the edge
falls lightly straight into the ocean
seven hundred feet below.
Postcards forgotten, I examine
The sky above me,
the sea below me.
I wrap my hand around a pebble,
the selfish thought
that I want this moment to be with me forever.
Eventually I get up
and crowd back onto the last bus home.
Long miles of nothingness and the

Half-asleep snores of open mouths

Packed shoulder to shoulder
The intermittent bursts of the broken TV
Curdle the sunlight inside of me.
I turn my face towards the window
Away from the mass of sleeping bodies
And mouth words to myself that fog up the glass.
The pebble burrows deeper into my flesh.
I came to Ireland to study Latin but now
all I want to write is poetry.
To priests, to schoolteachers,
to Vikings.
After all, who would read my words:
I, who think I can
milk the worlds goodness with one hand
and starve with the other?

The Pole Dancer

I am in love with you
like I am all beautiful women.
I deal with facts;
you flip them upside down,
turning as it were
with your impossible gravity,
hair barely brushing the ground.
You stretch all memory and time
around a single column
and I wonder what it is like
for bare skin to know air
while underneath, muscles cling
to life-giving steel.
The same knees keep you afloat
bent as they were in that pew,

that dark wood;

When I reached for your hand,
beneath your veil,
you pretended not to know me.

First Winter
We were children,
experiencing snow for the first time,
breathing words like smoke
into cold air.
Our mouths forming shapes,
trying to inhale warmth;
groping at each other with
mittened hands
for some tropical island,
far away from here.