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Two Poems
Agnes Hanying Ong
Waiting for God
Was it like the peals of laughter, heard while overrun by salt water? The otherness is deep, and one thing is for sure: the future steeped always in the past
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s bubbling, in between its breathful emergences. In a pew, I am a pebble. Count with me, my body is a dybbuk box thumping at the shore, where you left a set of footprints for another world, right here, the moon is nearer than it feels. Shadows of the seabed furrows are out to play. A ship comes up, from an underworld of fallen suns. Some of us survived the night, to forget. Again heavens sing in our ears, till our breaths are still numbered like lilies. I slough off an armor of cries to join the elements in the wind. Spirit asks if I sought the breadth of lies, or an arrowed road of devotion? I ask: can we stay afloat, learn to walk on water, know where to go?
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How I Meet My Maker
I read an authoritative recipe, to color our sclera till al dente and rosa. Is this peace, grass-fed purity of the game? Cold carrara roast, fingerlings pulling, piling bags of innards blue, sinless as sertraline. When it rains serotonin, powders, I ask you to eat my body in two minutes. Begin, at a coffee consent, to be an eye- hymen to sift a shelf life through open Psalms. There is always flapping uvula. It is like a sugar ring, flouring, feeling like sugar. Our ladies ululate for distant tinkles true, tame, hollow, crackling. Eros. I ascend the stalk of a sconce, small as a nude muse. Nailed too, to the rib of a holy temple. I am love and lighthouse, a how-to to house a god pumped full of lorazepam, corned, curious. And it is the solution for saudade: crème brûlée, hazy, systemic. Athame. A long make-do to feed bone, dust stirring stilled in tinned air at ribbon stage. On a crochet to serve I listen, properly, to the tick-tock of wrought iron fence. I could see seracs of tabula rasa, close-to-heart heart in everything. Since, I have been spasming with so much pod. Veristically, I could feel asleep for ever, in a ramekin. Pudding, pudding, pudding of hoar-hooves to river out, into one another ember day melting onto motorwaves of a soul wringing, jigging in years as a wax scene. It ends, with orb. Hope is a table of ripe peas. Bye Exodus, Anthropocene world. I bubble over to meet you at the door. An ineffable trembling darkens hereof, a rupture. Till then, I knit you to swoop, peck a cocoon, go on