Chapter 7
Ultramarine to Ruddy Blue
We take you across the deep blue sea. Into new shores. Here are border crossings of every kind. Across place and time. Across culture. Across idea and ideology. Across emotion, and what to expect of it. Inhabit these lyric spaces, and understand the power of the anecdotal. Take in the shared experience.
Here, Elizabeth Ip Xin En writes about Hong Kong, while Hedy Habra writes about Beirut. Kristie Ng takes us to “Kew Gardens, Spring”, then has “Conversations with the Man in the Box”.
Raised as a secular Jew in Russia, Liya M. Akoury gives us “Four Generations”. Phan Ming Yen, in turn, delivers the riveting “Remains”, a triptych that takes us from Hiroshima to Auschwitz to Singapore.
What is it like to lose your whole family in one breath, without warning? Read Bidhya Limbu’s song of longing in “geography”.
As Noelle Q. de Jesus writes, as the last stanza to her poem “Park Connector”: “Come, come see this other place, somewhere else, elsewhere, / for change and for pace, for being here, not there, now and not then, / and amid green and bark and sparkling air of white and blue, allow us / movement and growth and yielding, connection.”
Allene Nichols // Noelle Q. de Jesus
Elizabeth Ip Xin En // Mike Stone
Eric Tinsay Valles // Richard Oyama
