Chapter 3
Teal to Bleu de France
If blue had a taste to it. Would it be tart or rancid? Would it be biting, sometimes bittersweet? All our life moments should have a flavour, or at least be assigned one. It’s an attempt at recognition, of everything that happens to us, to account for their enduring effect, also their passage and temporality.
With Jovan Ang and Kishore Kalaichalvan, we read epistolary poems to fathers. Through Rin Azhar and Trent Busch, we receive poem messages to mothers. Witness the frenetic lines in Kemlyn Tan Bappe’s account of a strong armed robbery.
Lim Yi Tian’s “Sixteen Meals that You Might Have Eaten in a Dream” is a long poem of threaded instalments, where we are told this: “time after time we have forgotten to chew / on our traumas. by now / we would have consumed more than we are worth”.
In Anna Onni’s “Cored Softness”, we get the recipe for something of a process. It will hopefully help us “resist the hardness of the world with equal and greater strength”.
Anna Onni // Kishore Kalaichalvan
E. Laura Golberg // Migs Bravo Dutt
Felix Deng // Kemlyn Tan Bappe
