beginnings when I close my eyes

by Katrina Lee Yuen Yi



Words catch me in their soft padded

                  net — no fear for falling

concrete skyscraper contracting


I want to have something it wants

I want it clawed out of me

every little opening of temporality

                  finds mismatched running shoes


my ragdoll teases me without sound

it rips out my pages

dumps them in its tray of spilling milk

until the words spike up like hairball

it coos, “the mind makes up lots of things

and not all of them should be on the page”

                  if I matter enough

                  or my heart does

I look through a prism on my desk


                  every press

of the secretly tallying finger

                  the palpitating heart

lights up sorrow’s way along darkened gravel paths

like rightful temper tantrums

                  like orange juice seeping

into a laptop with its short wires

tangled like webs of a calamity

piecing together secrets I don’t know I have


how strange then

                  wondrous

somewhere in the world where existence gets

folded up many many times

enraptured in the smell of library

like a world inside a camera


how iridescent

                  — waves of pain in the birth of words

recorded by somebody else that lives inside me

somebody with cat eyes

                  whom I trust

like twins on a rusted swing






Author Bio: Writing gives me a scalpel-like precision to dig out otherwise buried thoughts, a stage to sound out otherwise inexpressible thoughts. Among the vastness of writing’s universe, I find poetry in particularly to be the most fitting medium for thoughts, feelings and ideas that are unusual and absurd and strange, nonetheless, that which hold so much weight and materiality. With poetry, I can be precise but indirect, my ruminations concrete but abstract. I also post (now sporadically) my admittedly mediocre writing on my Insta @written.k ; I’m still very much learning and growing as a writer, and would appreciate immensely if we could connect on there!