XVII

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. 

The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, 

they happen in our lives like car crashes, 

books that change us, neighborhoods

we move into and come to love. 

Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, 

women at least should know the difference

between love and death. No poison cup, 

no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder

should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder

not merely played but should have listened to us, 

and could instruct those after us: 

this we were, this is how we tried to love, 

and these are the forces they had ranged against us, 

and theses are the forces we had ranged within us, 

within us and against us, against us and within us."

-- Twenty-One Love Poems, Adrienne Rich 

leo to play gatsby in a fitzgerald revival?

the lit major in me can now die happy.

dreamer's dreams

original photo from ornamelle

fitzgerald always makes me feel like it's eternal summer:

where i wear white dresses

live in a beach house on the east coast

sip lemonade on my front porch

eat my fresh picked berries

watch the tide roll in

& surf through the literary works of The Lost Generation

singapore in canon

after some much needed rest

(to cure jetlag and the flu i caught)

the world traveler inside me insisted i reexamine 

my initial conclusion:

the iphone singapore is a tourist singapore

it snaps for aesthetics alone

whereas the canon singapore delves into the heart of the country

to the cooks preparing a sunrise meal,

to backgammon players in the sweltering heat,

to girls young in body and young in heart,

and to an Asia-born American who recalled what home tasted like.