Christian Yeo, Singapore
Mars
‘Mars will come to fear my botany powers.’
—Mark Watney, The Martian
Despite its redness,
Mars is a cold planet.
We cannot return now, not
when our planet is burning
with male apologies, floods
spilling like shared intimacy.
Do not mistake the silence
of our forests for comfort—
they died with things unsaid,
branding their throats with bile.
Mars is still bigger than I
imagined, the anthropocene
distant, thought experiment left too
late for the timeliness of empathy.
With notes of mutual longing, my
children play in an extemp sandbox,
the clarity of our slow burning
extraction too astringent for their
innocence to bear. Even so, I
cannot ask you to take me back.
The last gardeners
New one in the garden today,
talking silt to the old one.
In every Monday, Friday,
clearly an inept addition.
Unused to the wetness
of used soil, the hole at the
bottom of the watering gun
dribbles through tape.
Only in fragments:
after the old one teaches
boldness, he waters
me with gatling rhythm,
batters my lemongrass
so that they grow into
their metaphors. I have seen
the old one, I have seen him.
I have felt his fingers curl up
gently beneath my skin, his sweat
dissolving into my fibres.
He feeds me by the granule,
arranges them as pebbles
in the soakspray of sun.
Boy, listen to the earth.
I feel the new one’s ear,
pressed like he’s eavesdropping.
Rolled eyes, trembled cheeks.
The old one’s sleight of hand:
I loosen in verse, knowing
the rituals of my own wake.
Feel the fresh pivot of palms,
know their grief before I see
it, roaring for dams to burst.
Christian Yeo is a final-year Singaporean law undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. His poetry has been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ethos Books' This is not a safety barrier, the Eunoia Review, the jfa human rights journal, 6'98's Redefinitions, Notes, and ZETEO Magazine, among others. His work is forthcoming in [Insert] Zine, won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize in 2019, and was long-listed for the Sykes Prize 2021.