Cadence Chung
borderline sonata
SELF-ACTUALISATION
The night is sullen. My portrait
wanes against its golden frame.
It’s funny actually ‒ do you remember ‒
you might not ‒ the time I tried
to lick turpentine from the art teacher’s
brush? It was as clear as water, cutting
through the mud of an eye, the wet
brown outline of a cheek. You don’t
remember anyway, do you? Not on
a night like this, acid-lined and
stitched with broidery stars. I’ve
never needed stitches, but a knife
or two have gone missing in my
landscapes and come out as red
long-haul trade routes against flesh.
If you really wanted to understand
my portrait, as a critic or historian
would, you’d have to see it as a
country to be colonised ‒ the trembling
grass, the dented skin, the gold
clinging to its hinges. I’ve found out,
over the years, that if you put on enough
glitter eyeshadow, you wake up with
it streaming down your cold cheeks.
EXPLANATORY
‒and I explain myself
like I am a relic
like I am a holy object
being catalogued by a bitter, bitter atheist
I write poems like I write love letters
like I write pre-emptive eulogies
which is to say
perhaps I give away too much
which is to ask
am I doing too much?
which is to ask
am I too much?
And no answer would satisfy
no specimen
no muse
crushed under white-hot glass
would ever feel
like enough of an atonement
DEVELOPMENTAL
It takes a lot of grit, apparently, to survive
like this, to get up into the bleeding night
and still find some hunk to cut into as
yours, to take home into bed with you,
to sleep with, even when the loneliness
is sweet as a roadkill sparrow fermenting
into the pavement. They say some children
are like dandelions and will thrive in any
soil. Others are like orchids ‒ temperamental.
It’s that pickiness, in all its grotesque, pink-
tongued glory, that turns into the disorder
later on. That ache for the dry soil, the
dandelion sputum churning inside an orchid’s
tendrils. I sometimes wonder what came first.
The rejection, or the wanting. The hate, or the
hating. One of the key characteristics is
a yearning, a bottomless curve of desire
that can never be filled.
RE-LIVING
The acting coach said that grief
is a holding on in order to keep
and made us cling to each other’s
wrists, feet sliding against the floor,
tugging. My partner was a tall
boy I barely knew, his blue eyes
burning in his bright face. Funny.
I’d never noticed they were blue.
We stared at each other ‒ centres
of our eyes poised, focused, but
the outsides leaning out to their
edges. Like even focus was slipping
away. Like I was about to lose those
blue eyes I’d never cared for. Like‒
like losing anything, really. Like
any poem is about losing.
We pulled so hard we dripped
with salt, we left wet red tattoos
in the shapes of each other’s hands
on each other, we made each other’s
sebaceous filaments open and start
slowly weeping. And the more we
pulled, the further away we ended
up standing, him by the piano, me
by the door. There’s a lot of ways
to describe it. Sometimes they call
it a fear of abandonment. A reaction
to real or perceived rejection. A
get-away-before-you-get-rid-of-me.
I feel like it’s a grief ‒ like every time
I find someone, I lose them over and
over again. Like any poem is about
losing. Like every word fills a hole
with another emptiness, and the night
wanes, wanes against the moon, the
tides, the remnants of fingers drawing
love-hearts on the windowpanes.
CODETTA
When I remember that pulling,
I swear sparks of gold splatter flew.
Etched in my borders, the ugly sketch marks
suddenly there, graphite-pencil undeniable‒
and for the rest of the day my hands
smelled like his cologne.
ambre soir
The bathroom vanity has been emptied
and I find myself entrapped by an array
of forgotten perfumes, so bright and
vulgar in their bottles. I reach for an
expensive amber I bought on a whim
for its foreign name, unable to resist
such coquettish French allure. Tracing
it on my collarbone, I remember when I
wore it every evening, even though I
was allergic to it. If I were a cheaper
poet I would make something out of
that, but I won’t. My friend once said
that the problem with poets is all
their navel-gazing — any expression,
he said, is irreducibly and undeniably
private. But he is a flautist: and even
though he has to make song out of
wind, at least his instrument isn’t a
deceitful little larynx like mine.
When I go to bed I don’t even
dream of you. I disobey all rules of
feng shui and tilt my bed so my feet
are facing the door, in coffin position.
And I sleep like the dead all night.
Cadence Chung is a poet, student, composer, and musician from Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her debut poetry book anomalia was published in April 2022 with Tender Press. She can be found weeping in antique stores.