Cass Zheng
Contributor Biography
Cass Zheng is an aspiring poet who hopes to publish a collection of her own work one day. Previously published in the anthology, Anima Methodi: The Poetics of Mirroring, she thoroughly enjoys writing formal, postmodernist and lyrical poetry. She is currently working on her first manuscript of poems.
forty-two
after Googling, “the answer to life, the universe and everything”
it begins with wizened mahogany—
aflame in degrees of fervour fighting for
oxygen as if there’s a rush to relinquish itself
of its chores then by nature or by force: annihilated
–––
it is 2042 where the only religion is sedatives to
be hooked up with in commingled shades, shapes and sizes
and its denominations led by a belief that one or
some or none could lead us to our own second coming
–––
if this is what the ones above bequeathed to me
why am i greeted by your absence in the forty
second song of promises and only avowed a
hunger that a ravenous being no longer remembers
––
if forty-two is the answer to all of the above then
it’ll take forty-two ekphrastic expressions to
recognise that churches are vessels to the other
side of nihilism before the candles go out
Low Kian Seh
Contributor Biography
Low Kian Seh has a chemical engineering degree but is an artist to a larger degree. He is a chemistry teacher by occupation but has poetry as preoccupation. For the love of the craft, he makes time to write, despite being a busy civil servant and father of three. His works have been published in SingPoWriMo anthologies, A Luxury We Cannot Afford, A Luxury We Must Afford, Twin Cities, Anima Methodi, Contour and Seven Hundred Lines. He won first prize in Singapore’s National Poetry Competition 2019, and he is better known for his twin cinema poem, "Singaporean Son", that went viral, twice.
clean
first encounter was when I mistook
stout for coke, as a child—bitterness;
when the same could be said of
life, liquor was then a solution
for the insolvent. cleanliness is next
to godliness: I doubt my pastor
knew what being clean meant
for me. now I douse my hands
with same root compound—except
at higher concentration, perhaps
lower frequency; burns all the same.
those with clean hands will grow stronger:
I palm this promise from the book of Job
but learnt: only alcohol on, not in, the body
sanitizes—yet still does not wipe away sin