Animality

Animality

by Leon Wing

Degrees around then back
Then back again to start,
He found a fitting finally.
He clicked on nails, bleed-
Ing trails of notes be-
Tween fuzz, sizing her up,
Jawing her neck. In turn
She seized the top of his
Head, kneading calm his
Chrysoberyl glare.

© Leon Wing 2009

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Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music, as when he writes for Puisy-poesy.

The future is bright - and fishy

GROWN UP

by Leon Wing

“I’m only going out for a bit, to get you some nice fish for your dinner. Wouldn’t that be nice, a nice bit of fish?” Mrs Tan wheedled, looking a little closer at her little boy, playing at soldiers on the kitchen floor. Or is it hunting seals, the way he was mauling the teddy bear.

     She already had on her red riding hood, to keep her hair from frizzing and the rest of her from dehydrating; even if the temperature outside was below 30 degrees in the afternoon, said TV Eleven’s weather announcement earlier.

     She wondered how the fish at the market she was taking a walk to would keep. And, these days there were so many new varieties, some with more than two eyes, and sometimes with muscly fins, looking like attenuated arms.

     She shuddered, remembering the last time she was at the fish stall, squatting before a pile of fish. She nearly leapt backwards (as if she herself had gotten extra limbs, like some frog-like legs) when a still-breathing fish stretched its thick arm-like fin up at her face. The fishmonger lady cackled, with glee, “So fresh ah?”

     Had she seen any change about him yet? She was wary he was about to grow out of his present state, being five now. That was normally the stage at which Malaysian children grew out their limbs.

     She then remembered she had to check on his grandmother, who was upstairs, sleeping off the noon lunch. She left her son to his own devices, to climb the stairs.

     No harm would come to him there, now; she’d kept all the sharp utensils out of his way, into locked drawers and cupboards. Most of her furniture were recently reinforced – the expense! – as last week he managed to wrench out a couple of them – the strength children had these days! - and started brandishing the knives around his little brother, who was only one.

     She tippy-toed over to her mother’s bed, and looked. Mother’s eyes were shut tight, and her mouth was opened. Moving closer, she exclaimed, “Oh mother, what big teeth you have!”, and Grandma snapped opened her large eyes and glared out, answering, “The better to eat yo- I mean – to eat the fish you’re getting for dinner.”

     Back downstairs again, she went into the kitchen one last time before heading off to the market.

     “Oh my, what have you done now?”

     She bent over her little boy – he has grown quite a bit, now, she saw – taking in the mess on the floor.

     Not the ruined teddy bear, no. Rather, her other little boy, now all torn up and half chewed off.

     And her surviving little boy now had a new pair of arms.

© Leon Wing 2009

Leon Wing:  When writing this story, I had this theme at the back of my head, of global warming causing harm to humans in the near future. Here in Malaysia, it is hot enough as it is, but in the future the heat is going to frizzle your hair, and then some.  And, the population is mutating, as is the fish we catch as food.   Reminded of those twisted fairy tales of Angela Carter, I threw in some fairy-tale elements -- sort of Angela Carter-meets-Stephen King.  One of the reactions I got from this story is "too stomach-churning for our lunch-time reading crowd". 

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music, as when he writes for Puisy-poesy.

Psychic Snail Post

I licked the stamp

by Leon Wing

I licked the stamp

I posted the stamp
under my tongue
Saliva and glue kissed
danced together
burned the nous
Seeing strobed
Heart bosomed
Legs lost locus
Nostrils flamed out
sparking the danced ground
Someone’s fleck surged
large close
into my iris

I see black

© Leon Wing 2008

Listen to this poem:

Leon Wing: Someone called out to another,"Lick the stamp". A song is playing in the background: if you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair ...  This is from the finale of a documentary I was watching on an Aus network TV, about hippies invading San Francisco in the groovy 60s.  I licked actual stamps there, for postcards (not in the 60s, course not) ... in London,  well ...

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music, as when he writes for Puisy-poesy.

Cain Canine

Cain Canine

By Leon Wing

His canines kill
his sibling as he keels
over and dies
in jest, learning their mother’s
ways in the paved tropics,
these kitties, so appealing
even when they can bore
a punctum as precisely as the point
on her kitchen knife can stab
into the plates of the fish,
their last repast
of the eventide, her sons
watching and waiting
for the kill

© Leon Wing 2008

Listen to this poem:

Leon Wing:  As per usual I'm writing about killing, this time in a poem.  I tend to put in some cats into my work now.  The ones in here are learning the ways of the feline world, in order to survive.  I also bring into the picture a mother and her scary sons.

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music, as when he writes for Puisy-poesy.

"Before": a Halloween special

Before

by Leon Wing

Before the rats picked at the blood and flesh on the fragments of her skull dotted all over the rails, before her head got crushed and brain matter splattered all over, and shattered bones, still with some flesh around them, flung everywhere on the rails, before some passengers in the LRT were jerked off their seats when the LRT hit something solid and nearly derailed, before the people waiting to get on screamed and some turned their heads away, before the LRT couldn’t stop from running over her, before she fell off the edge onto the rails below, before she looked out at the buildings beyond, where a little boy would witness from his bedroom window a horrific sight that would traumatise him for days on end, before she trudged up the stairways to the rail platform, before she got up the first landing, before going up the dirty stairs, she slipped and fell, the bottom of her slipper catching onto some rotting piece of fruit someone had spit out because he was duped into buying some old mushy piece of produce, slipping and falling headlong onto the stairs, killing herself.

© Leon Wing 2008

Leon Wing: I've been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett lately, his short prose, mostly.  I wrote this short short a day before Halloween.  I wanted it to have ... well, more gore than normally found in most of my writings (actually the last one has quite a bit of blood), but without those cheesy short sentences, sometimes with screaming exclamations. I wanted a short short with a long long sentence - on a long long grammatical track, waiting to see if I get syntactically derailed - and, in the bargain, happening in reverse order.  Something experimental, something unusual.

Something macabre?

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. Woo woo hooo! Macabre? Especially when he likes to kill off some of his characters. Gorily.

"The Smell" by Leon Wing

The Smell

By Leon Wing

She didn’t flush after evacuating, or even wipe herself .  She went to the bureau  in the adjoining room of the apartment, to rifle through the drawers for any clean clothes to put on. She sniffed at her pong, but she thought the smell coming from the kitchen was even worse.

     She had been getting familiar with all the rooms in this apartment for a week now, sleeping in one, then the other. Like Goldilocks and the three bears, she finally found the softest, most comfortable, bed.

     She wasn’t going back to bed, now that she was up, even if the sun wasn’t.  Outside was humid, and dusty ten floors down, in the KL streets. Up here, she made to go into the kitchen, but the smell caused her to gag.

     She had to go in, anyway.  How else was she going to get to the fridge, for something to eat, having finished off any edible stuff around this place?  The last real meal was before there was that smell, when she used the knife, when it was still clean.

     Now, it was dirty.  It was congealed with blood.  She pulled the knife out of the rotting body on the kitchen floor.  She wiped the blood off the blade on her clothes, and sliced some bread up for sandwiches.

© Leon Wing 2008

Creative process: Leon Wing:  I wrote this while facebooking with someone.  When our conversation finished so did this short story.  I was not composing it in my usual manner, which is long complex syntax, as with my other pieces.  This time I wanted to get the story down fast without thinking too much about style, grammar, sentence structure; all those linguistics gimmicks (pun!).   I dashed this off in the fashion of flash fiction – or whatever people now term these types of writing – short shorts, micro fiction, flash fiction, 1-minute, 20-minute (from McSweeney’s).

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. However, he does write  fiction, at times, like this time.

"Gaze" by Leon Wing (with Audio)

Gaze

By Leon Wing

From my window, opened,
A scow across the sploshing road,
My gaze cruises my gate, ajar,
Towards the neighbours, locked
Behind their door, shuttered.

His fife strident,
The old man could have had shunted
The ring into her digit,
Binding the woman into
Matrimonial damnation.

The wife’s gaze loses my gate, afar.
The old man roots behind her,
Scowling, eavesdropping for any splashing
By the minnow, trapped
In her glass tank,
In the terrible terrace.


August 21, 2008

© Leon Wing 2008

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Creative process: Leon Wing : This poem begins with someone gazing from her window, at the neighbours behind their window, the wife gazing back. While “my gate” is “ajar”, their “door” is “shuttered”, closed. They are “locked” behind it.

“a scow across the sploshing road” qualifies the looker’s gaze. A scow is some kind of flat-bottomed boat or barge for carrying goods. “sploshing” suggests the ocean or the sea, a very long way across it, a wide divide. This implies a widely differing circumstance between the looker and the lookee: one is unfettered, free; the other bound into a marriage she cannot escape from.

A fife is a kind of flute which accompanies drums in a marching band. However, this fife is harsh-sounding, when played in their wedding, where the husband forced, not slipped, the marital ring into the wife’s finger. “digit” reveals how he viewed her finger - and her person - as just a body part or an object. This ring is not merely that but a ring on a chain, to bind her into an eternal hell of a marriage.

The first line of the last stanza mirrors the third line of the first stanza, in rhyme and sounds : the AY in the pairs of “gaze” and “gate”, the ER and AH in “ajar” and “afar”, and the OOSES in “cruises” and “loses”. This mirroring evokes a comparison between the looker and the “wife”: one is free; the other is locked, in her house, and in a bad marriage.

The wife cannot get away, because her husband has practically planted (“roots”) both of them so deeply into their marriage, neither he nor the wife can climb out of it. “Scowling, eavesdropping for any splashing” compares with “a scow across the sploshing road” in line 2 of stanza one. “Scowling” harks back to “scow” in the first stanza, in sound, for comparision. “scow” describes a calm gaze over a long but not actual distance, and “scowling” indicates an intense and angry emotion. “across” has a similar sound, of O, in “eavesdropping”. And, “splashing” and “sploshing” both have the same half-rhyme, to compare the freedom of the sploshing in the first stanza and the tanked-in splashing of the trapped minnow.

“By the minnow, trapped” is similar to “From my window, opened” in line 1 of the first stanza, in construction and sounds. The reader can link “minnow” to “window”, in their similar sounds. The looker’s “window” is opened while the “minnow” is kept inside a tank: contrast “opened” and “trapped”.

“trapped” and “tank” have mute consonants, p and k. “trapped”, when enounced, closes the mouth, trapping or stopping the sound. With “tank”, the glottis is stopped or blocked, baulking the sound further. The “minnow” is held captive, like the wife, who has her freedom blocked.

The last line, “In the terrible terrace”, closes the poem by repeating the “ter” sound in “terrible terrace”. You sense the terror - the terror - of the woman.


Leon Wing deconstructs poems in Puisi-Poesy, and has his own blog. He edits the poetry section of The Malaysian Poetic Chronicles webzine.

'Birthing' by Leon Wing

Birthing

by Leon Wing

Within the netted pyramid she
Slumps, the ancient book forgotten.
Dead words war
Into the dreams of the
Nile courting her with carrion eye
Lids from vultures’ leavings.

Without, the screaming nuzzles through
Feathered downs of drowsiness. She
Hears the wake of crying
In a litter of whistling
Breaths. The mother coos
The new births into mews.


© 2008 Leon Wing


Creative process:  Leon Wing: In the first two lines of the first stanza the rhythm is regular : in the first line, regular rising tones – unstress then stress; in the second, a falling tone, the stressing scheme reversed. There are around 4 beats in each line, with some unstress to stress promotion on particular syllables, to maintain the tone schemes. I place ‘she’ right at the end of line 1 to evoke a breathing out sound, usually heard when one is sleeping deeply.

I break from these regular rhythms in the 3rd line with three stressed monosyllabic words. You read them slowly: I want to make the reader feel something is ominous in ‘Dead words war’. The pace picks up in the next line, which has only one stressed word, ‘dreams’, right centre of it. The speed rushes at the start of this line, and slows at ‘dreams’, and picks up again after it. This gives the effect of a rushing about in her dreams.

The last two lines in this stanza is Dali-esque: the scene is weird and unreal. You see the Nile trying to seduce her with some nasty torn flesh from remains of some vultures’ scavenging meal. For the last line here I try to evoke some lulling effect by using a lot of ‘l’ sounds.

In the next stanza a crying sound outside of her bedroom (or her sleep/dream) is trying to break into her consciousness. In the first two lines I repeat the rising and falling tone schemes of the first two lines of the first stanza. I also place ‘she’ at the end of a line, instead of in line 1, in line 2 this time.

Finally she wakes to the sound of first breaths during birthing, like the whistling sound you hear when you squeeze the air out of a beach ball. We now see, or rather, hears a mother making soothing sounds to her new litter. The nearly but not actual half rhymes of ‘coos’ and ‘mews’ signal the end of the piece.


Leon Wing writes about poems for Puisi-Poesy, and has his own blog. He has written for men's magazines like Men's Health and Plan B, gadget magazines like S&P, Surf! and Mobile World. He sometimes writes for StarMag, reporting, and reviewing books. He has a short story published in Malaysiakini's Rentakini Cerpen. He currently has a few works of fiction, poetry and essay in a new literary magazine Elarti:2.