Poetry / March 2016 (Issue 31)


Rambutans

by Shuli de la Fuente-Lau

My father didn't know any
better, so he chose the biggest bunch of them all.

That is how the story goes, the one reminisce of light,
in a courtship many dusty years ago, before the
empty stomachs, and the stale darkened bedrooms,
before the fights and the silences, and all
those words thrown against walls, before the disease,
and the staggering walk, before the trajectories
that refused to bend towards the same horizon but
somehow found themselves aligned, taut with dusty
rubberbands,

like the branches of those rambutan, bound together
in the biggest bunch that made my mother's eyes
as wide as her stammering heart, looking, looking at the only
man who brought her her favourite.
 
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