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This issue, we are focusing on works by writers in ASEAN. What do you think makes Southeast Asia unique to the rest of the world?
Paradise
by Boey Kim Cheng
It has slipped the laborious arcs
of trade-routes, sealing the spices’
scent from ferreting ships, sitting
beyond the itinerary’s telescope.
Only when the mind has peeled off
reason and history will you see
it, and perhaps then give away
all these cloud-capped towers
and Utama’s crown
for a place where we can begin again,
in the opposite direction
from what we are.
Boey Kim Cheng has published five collections of poetry and a travel memoir entitled Between Stations. Born in 1965, he emigrated from Singapore to Australia in 1997. He taught creative writing at the University of Newcastle for 14 years before joining Nanyang Technological University in 2016.
Inside Submarines
by Phan Nhien Hao
tr. Linh Dinh
We live inside odd-shaped submarines
chasing after secrets and the darkness of the ocean
on a voyage toward plastic horizons
where vague connections can never be reached
and hopes are not deployed
before the storm arrives and the alarm command starts
to rouse the last illusions to stand up and put life jackets on
looking to each other for help
Once I was at the equator
trying to slice the earth in half along the dotted line
but someone held my hand and said:
“If you do that, friend, water will fall into the void,
and then our submarine
won’t have any place to dive.”
Phan Nhiên Hạo was born in Kontum, Vietnam in 1967 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1991. He is the author of two collections of poems in Vietnamese, Thiên Đường Chuông Giấy (Paradise of Paper Bells, 1998) and Chế Tạo Thơ Ca 99-04 (Manufacturing Poetry 99-04, 2004). In 2006, Tupelo Press published Night, Fish, and Charlie Parker, a bilingual poetry collection translated by Linh Dinh.
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