By Rachel Kuanneng Lee

CW: Suicide

(I think it’s going to be a long wait.)
Since you’re here in the kitchen
waiting with me,

why not I tell you
a secret or
two? You see, we don’t

know each other
very well, and I’ve developed a weakness
for telling secrets

to strangers.

*

Secret: My younger sister killed herself.

These days, I want
to start every conversation
with that statement. I can trace

this feeling back to its
beginning:
I felt the desire bloom

on the edge
of the pavement where I stood with the plainclothes police officer.
“If there’s anything else you think

might help with the investigation, or if you have
any questions,
you have my number,” he says.

Motioning to leave now, his hands are full with zip-lock bags
of her belongings. “Wait,” I am teetering,
“Her friends. They would want to know.”

He fishes for her phone in a zip-lock, gives
me the number of the friend she last
texted, to whom she had said

nothing of her plans:

The rope she’d bought, from which I’d earlier
cut her stiff neck. Her phone left
passwordless, from which I now

get a phone number. And then, there is no secret. The wake
is a three-day affair. Her friends tell more friends,
and they come, and they come some more.

One collapses beside her open casket. One paces
the parlor, reads the dedications
others have earlier written, sits and

talks with old classmates, stays
till midnight, drives another home, comes
back the next day, and then

approaches her body. It is a face
painted several shades too dark—to mask the blue—
a skin-tight dress in flowers of white and orange

distending gently at the stomach. It is falsies I buy
at the nearest Watson’s on the first morning,
when my mother weeps at the trauma

death brings to her daughter’s lash extensions. The funeral director
calls the undertaker back to affix the two black fans
onto lids whose eyes do not see—

but it must be done.

My mother insists.
And she is right. You only need
see the result to know—after all, my sister would not

have wanted to be seen ugly, only dead. But come back
to the boy—he holds her small hand, warm from every
body’s aching grasp.

One brings flowers. Another, too.
They all bring flowers, although my sister
will tell you she hates

receiving flowers. They die.
She does not know
what to do with them,

but what you give up in exchange for choosing
your death is the ability to shape
this story.

*

And so, there is no secret.
There isn’t one because I
have decided there won’t be one.

In my ideal world, I begin
each conversation after her death with
“My sister killed herself,”

and maybe I become
the one who outrageously overshares or
the one who would

use suicide to call attention
to herself.
If I were trying

to get you to like me,
neither of those is a good
place to be,

but you see, stranger,
that really isn’t
what I want.

*

***박인주 - Ghost Flower 1***
A black-and-white landscape painting of an inky forest. A cluster of pine trees appears to be covered with clumps of snow. The white spots at the top of the image bleed into the black background.

Secret: Earlier this year, I started thinking a lot about Wilfred Owen again.

I get to know Owen over two years, through
critical analysis in English Literature class of a slim
book of collected poems. In the Faber & Faber,

we streak lines like streamers, marking
pages now browned from the edges.
I am seventeen and

eighteen and living
in the most affluent city in Southeast Asia.
What do I know of war?

The Japanese occupation, the British
abandonment, all pieces put together to reason
my country’s Enlistment Act, the propaganda

reel in the cinema, where I appear
the smiling girlfriend, wife, mother.
Not shown, of course, the ones who touch men torn

of war “like some queer disease”, or men
who return to find all doors shut to them, or the boys
whose blades “keen with the hunger of blood”.

On a sticky afternoon, we split
the book down to “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”.
An arrow curves

from title to margin, where we pencil “(An) Apology
for My Poetry”. Then, in greater gray scribblings—Owen is NOT
apologizing, NOT sorry. He expresses

no guilt for depicting the horrors of war, or writing
its dull hopelessness. It is not hope
he sees on the battlefield.

He does not seek our forgiveness for turning young men
from war’s burnished honors or desire to temper his excoriating ending, “These men are worth
Your tears: You are not worth their merriment”,

with regret at his own scorn. We annotate:
in Greek, an “apologia” is a defense—
a justification. What Owen wants

is to convince us that the sight of someone “guttering, choking,
drowning”, their “drooping tongues”, “chasms round
their fretted sockets” makes at least sufficient case

against the glory of dying,
even if for your country. And I promise you,
there is no glory left

in the masks
of the dying. You
recoil,

no, I—I recoiled—
when I saw her body in death,
venous, purpled,

bathed in the room’s garish orange lamplight.
“Move him into the sun”, says Owen’s speaker,
“If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.”
I want to be the sort of person who shrieks a solar flare into existence.
Instead, for a precious few

seconds, I freeze. I
freeze and I say to myself,
“Is there any way we can please not-see this?”

At the cusp
of the eclipse, just before
the sun turns dark,

the speaker begs, “Please”.
She spins around on her heel, willing herself to
stay—walk away—stay. Please.

*

Is this a better way
to tell a secret? If I do it this way,
do you ask yourself

who Wilfred Owen is? Do you wonder
if he is my first
boyfriend? For a moment, do you

think maybe I’m still hung
up over him?
Can’t expect everyone to know

a First World War poet, no matter my
personal inclinations. Those of you who do know
might be torn

between the curiosity of the connection and the
minor irritation that I should drag
this dead white man

into this. But the familiarity—
does it endear you to me for a while? Enough that maybe
when the poem draws on,

you’ll be the ones
who’ll listen when I open my mouth and each time
out spills my dead sister—her pale

body plastic-wrapped, lids fallen back
to blood-laced whites. Nearer you, a foot arched out,
the big toenail cracked burgundy.

“I need you to…” “—yes”, you
hear the words said, “I confirm that this is my
sister.”

*

Secret: I’m sorry about the oranges I once dropped in front of a Buddhist altar.

The oranges are Sunkist, which really means
it isn’t my fault, because unlike mandarins
that are flat-topped, these

are round. Consider this
a two-fold apology, as in “I’m sorry I dropped the oranges”, but also
“I had a very good reason for dropping these oranges”. I mean,

they stack four round fruit in a pyramid
and you’re supposed to hold it and bow—a sign of respect for the dead, an invitation
to eat in this syncretic jumble of Chinese-Singaporean-Buddhist tradition, except

in most situations, it is younger folk who perform this
100th day commemoration rite for those older than them.
In that moment, when I should have been thinking

about balancing oranges, I was thinking about kiwis.
A hundred days and two weeks before,
my sister makes a new Instagram account.

It is public-facing,
to celebrate the small,
daily

joys.

There are a total of eight posts.
She captions one, her brow furrowed, eyes squinting in the afternoon sun, simply
“I loved today”. Another

at my octogenarian aunt’s, slide one:
her, smiling at the camera, pretending
to rearrange a fridge magnet. Two: a back view

of me in Lunar New Year red dress, looking at the same set
of magnets. Three: selfie. Me (left), her (right).
Four: a family photo. Five: a still

from the movie “Soul”. This series she captions
“One day I’ll have my own
sun-drenched old lady kitchen, where I’ll eat

a kiwi over the sink
while looking out the window
[Kissy face, no heart eyes] [Half kiwi]”.

For several years, my own WhatsApp status reads,
“still desires kiwi fruit”.
We speak in obtuse angles

about one day making an indie movie with a scene
where the protagonist in an oversized t-shirt and boyshorts cuts
a kiwi in half, stands over

the kitchen sink and eats it, spoon by spoon.
Green kiwi juice in little spurts everywhere. Camera pans out
and then we see

a contented smile play across her lips.
“Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses”,

says Owen’s speaker in “Mental Cases”. If you look
at the posts framing her likeness,
is that how you should see them? False?

Me? I don’t know.
Before the wake, my brother coordinates
an effort to memorialize her. Her best friend gathers photographs

and you see her—smiling out
from every single one. No kiwis
in sight but the first time

she tries to kill herself I am wearing a kiwi-green calf-length skirt, my first
day at a new job. It is a good day. I get home,
open the door to my room and

find her sitting
in a puddle of her own puke.
A mug of brown liquid, a packet

of twenty-four pills dispensed by the mental
health institute emptied at the bed’s foot.
Dazed,

she refuses to speak to anyone but me.
Her small damp fingers grasping mine, “You don’t
understand… I’m not supposed to be here,

I was supposed to die,” she whispers.
And four years

later, she does finally
succeed, and I
standing stupidly

askew of the altar,
I think how, for all the sharp colors
pin-pressed into my mind, this is

the only apology I receive.

And so, I
drop the oranges—they should have
been kiwis anyway.

*

For ten months, I’ve told this secret. “I’m sorry,”
I begin. One time, with a trigger
warning. Another time I say,

“This is a horrific thing and I know you’ll feel bad
for me once I say it, but several
months have passed and I’m

okay now.” Each time, I make
to begin somewhere else and to go
someplace different. Each time,

I apologize. Maybe today instead, I will stick

my hands into the secret and try to cut it open
to something different. I watched a video where a man slices
an apple diagonally across—upper right

to lower left—it was enough for me to
buy a chef’s knife so I, too,
can scallop my apples into swans. It made me think,

heck, if I watch enough videos, maybe I could carve
all my fruits and vegetables
into some kind of brilliant animal. I could

whittle a kiwi until I see seed but think
death. Or I could slice it in half and
hand one off to you, stranger.

The spoon is in the topmost drawer
underneath the sink. I am waiting
for my apology. Will you wait
with me?

Rachel Kuanneng Lee writes poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming at Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, wildness, carte blanche, Dialogist, ANMLY, Sweet, and elsewhere. She was a part of the inaugural cohort for the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program and is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. You can reach her at rachel-lee.me.

*

박인주 is an independent Korean illustrator and writer. Outside of their main illustration work, they also host classes about movie commentaries and illustrations.

I am waiting for an apology.

By Rachel Kuanneng Lee

About
Singapore Unbound

I am waiting for an apology.

By Rachel Kuanneng Lee

About Singapore Unbound

About
Singapore Unbound