by Sher Ting
Hinomaru. What’s mine is yours.
All this earth and the blood raised on it.
Kimigayo. How language became
a man with a trigger. And when I spoke
about grief, there was another warm body
to pull from the dead. When we pronounced
Kako (the past), we took only the letters
from our history. The o to mark the point
of separation, the object removed from its place.
I was a set of particles forced into
dissimilar syntax, orbiting a gravitas
of moras, wondering if hate was a language
or if we had written a language into hate.
The classrooms etched with 尊敬
but we’d long stopped calling things what they are.
The old tonalities effaced
as an escarpment in the dark.
I speak little in the columbariums of former lovers.
The jarring pain that geminates from
anything even the absence of song.
The warring echo, a diminishing cry
till the walls have smothered its voice.
I write about bushido
how the Japanese word for 静 (silence)
sounds too much like 净 (clean)
When the planes have drowned the screams
of the birds, I write misogi watching
the rain beat a city out of its eye.
I know only of how we have bled
from one defeat to the next—
silence
the only violence that is immortal—
and I’m only terrified of the unknown,
like a hand reaching from the dark,
not knowing
what it’ll find next.
Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria, a member of Kenyon Review’s Winter Workshop 2023, and a Tin House Winter Workshop participant. She has work published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, OSU The Journal, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is published with Cathexis Northwest Press, and her second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is published with Mouthfeel Press. She is the winner of the Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize 2023, and her debut full length collection, Burn After Dawn, is forthcoming with Willow Springs Books. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com.