Grace Chia

Far Gone

Language: english

Translations: german (Weit gegangen)

Far Gone

Your presence, kryptonite.
I grovel, weak-kneed,
eating earth, shattered,
thoughts frosted to icicles;
an igloo, I am, stoked by flames
within the cavern,
between barred walls of my ribs;
inside, a ball of blood
threatens to erupt
secrets of skeleton in whispers,
ghost words wrapped as candied curses.

Every sentence you speak is aphrodisiac.
A charmed scorpion, unstirred.
I am fleeing through
curtains and curtains of silken lies:
a masquerade; coven —
I, exiled from myself, stuck
in an outer universe, unmapped,
unable to return; unhinged,
a helium caricature ungrounded,
going up, up and away
into an oblivion of a loopy, speechless echo.

Grace Chia

photo © Grace Chia

* 1973, Singapore, Singapore
lives in: Singapore, Singapore

Grace Chia (b. 1973) is a poet, writer, journalist and editor from Singapore. She is the author of several poetry books, a novel and a collection of short stories. Her debut poetry collection womango (1998) deals with confessional poetry, poetic prose, concrete poetry and performance poetry to explore themes of identity politics from an Asian, female point of view. Her second collection of poems, Cordelia (2012), was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2014 for poetry. Her third poetry collection Mother of All Questions came out in 2017.

photo © Grace Chia

Grace Chia's writing has been widely anthologised in Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and the US, e.g. in Anthology of English Writing in Southeast Asia, Singapore Literature in English, The Brooklyn Rail, Poetry.sg, Stylus Poetry Journal, SingaporePoetry.com and many more and translated for die horen, La Traductiere and Knijzevne Novine for Germany, France and Serbia, respectively. She was the first female writer from Singapore to be invited to the Austin International Poetry Festival, Queensland Poetry Festival and National Young Writers Festival in Australia, and she features regularly at the Singapore Writers Festival. She is the editor of the prose anthology We Are Family, and Junoesq Literary Journal, which she founded. The inaugural NAC-NTU Writer-in-Residence for 2011-2012, she has taught creative writing at Nanyang Technological University and DigiPen Singapore Institute of Technology.

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