Tim Tim Cheng
Two Poems
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The Tattoo Collector
.
He wasn’t the first to say I really like your
jellyfish. I didn’t know it reached
from your spine all the way down your thighs.
.
Thanks, I said, It’s not the most obvious thing
when you first meet a person.
.
From bed to café, our faces looked different.
I thought of facing a fallen tree:
its robust aerial roots, my hair loosening
.
from a bun, the jellyfish on my back
formed an orgy of symmetries.
.
He liked it when I told him
I was grading papers with a red pen
as my blood seeped through tattoo needles
.
—a marble marriage
with swirling tentacles.
Re: Do you feel guilty for not writing in your mother tongue?
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We are in a field. The grass is unruly.
.
I stand holding a mirror. My torso is out of view.
.
To you, the field is tunnelling through me.
.
The views behind and before me merge.
.
I serve the mirror that frames the field that frames the mirror.
.
Between the field and the mirror, the grass is already something else.
.
All that grammar and glimmer.
.
For the grass to reach the mirror, you cannot be proximate.
.
It is generous. Both of us, almost missing.
.
We seem not to go or stay.
.
.
.
Tim Tim Cheng is the author of Tapping At Glass (VERVE, 2023), which was one of the Poetry Society Books of the Year. Her debut collection, The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she is based between Glasgow and London.
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