Poetry by Jee Leong Koh
THE CERAMICIST For Hong-Ling Wee (arr. 1992) On a NASA scholarship to map the world, she walked into a workshop on a whim to throw a lump of clay on a wheel and feel a foggy, quiet, pink, revolving world evolve into an object of the mind under the body’s pressure, slight and sure, and, afterwards, surrender to the fire, not that of fire, but that of accident, for a ceramic rocket fallen back to earth. And this she did, for many years, living on little, explaining less, until she was surrounded by the fuselage. When the towers gashed vermilion and buckled, she was alone at home in Union Square. The noise expanded as it dribbled off to meet its echo, second detonation worse than the first report, in summoning half-buried images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a foreign mood, she heard the phone ring and a female voice, acclimatised but recognisable as Singaporean, asked for Wee Hong Ling. She never tires of telling this story, how the Consulate located her and every Singaporean within an hour of disaster, when a black hole opened but was avoided because a star had called, a star called home. She never tires of telling this story, which I now tell you in my own fanciful way, each iteration also explanation, the how developing into the why, why her pitchers, bowls, vases levitate. (First published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore and collected in Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America, Bench Press, 2023)
Jee Leong Koh is a Singaporean writer, editor, and publisher living in New York City. His hybrid work Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. His book of poems Steep Tea (Carcanet) was named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times in the UK and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. Other honours include being shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize in English poetry for The Pillow Book and Connor & Seal.
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