LAETITIA KEOK
The Rivers of Us
We are in bed.
I tell you stories:
My childhood
home was two storeys
high, with bright
yellow cupboards &
stairs my sister &
I liked to leap off
like frogs.
My mother kept
a jar of saga seeds
in a locked drawer.
I know because
she showed me.
Poured them into
my open palm &
made me count: nine,
she said, for eternity.
I did not know, then,
the word
for desire
would have the shadow
of your name,
or the heat of your
body, trembling against
mine. I have come
to know tenderness
is just another word
for fear—for guilt—
for my mother’s yearning,
which is now also mine.
I imagine
she once loved a girl, too.
How else to explain
the way the sky wept
when I was born
fingers curling around
the throat of a desire
I could not yet name?
She was a girl once.
She must have
known hunger,
must have weaved
her body into
the body of a girl
& tasted a want so guttural,
there was no end &
no beginning.
Yet I am proof that love
does nothing.
It is not that easy,
I know—who, at the catch
of a promise,
could choose death?
We are in bed.
You ask me
for a better story. I say:
when I love you, I think
the world will end,
red string ribboning
our skin to shreds.
How can it not?
You laugh &
I think there must
be a word for this,
but of course
there are no words at all.
Only your body
weaving into mine,
entangling us.
We are water.
So this is drowning.
On the shoreline
of another river,
I watch a girl
touch my mother
into existence.
Scooping thirst
from her lips,
with her lips,
gathering guilt enough
to rename the universe.
I hear her say:
come, let us be fish,
& they are water.
They are inventing
beautiful things.
We are in bed. The girl
touches me
holy. I touch her raw.
There is no language
for this.
We are inventing one.
Laetitia Keok is a writer and editor from Singapore. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published in Wildness Journal, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She edits for Gaudy Boy and Sine Theta Magazine. Find her at laetitia-k.com