JASMINE GUI


Born in Singapore, raised in Suzhou and then Hong Kong, Jasmine Gui currently
lives and works in Toronto. She is the Founder of Project 40 Collective, and the
Managing Editor at LooseLeaf magazine. Her writing has been published by
ricepaper, Hart House Review, text, Acta Victoriana, Red Paint Hill, (parenthetical),
and more. She loves and reads with the literary diaspora. Find her here.






Blink:

the reservoir rises in my mouth. a vacuous rupture.



further out we pause at the skeletal
frame of a temple where

the mudskip ends its pilgrimage
and begins to prays.

when the tsunami arrived, it swallowed the ocean and left
the harbour
without a tide;
an accident nobody remembers.

the clan jetties, collecting life in
alms, kneel in splinter.

the mudskip cannot hear its own request,
realizes it has no tongue
left.



I sit at the dark start of throat and
reconcile puddles with their centres.
this year the moon is a double yolked lotus cake
carried on swollen backs.
lanterns into dotting blackness.

I am not peering but it
frightens me. How deep a body is.
How bodies are almost water
and even such a big moon is eventually eaten.

How precipice, when said,
is a scrambling anthill in my mouth.



someone falls into the colour
blue; a shade
silting under my tongue.

I watch them on yesterday's longitude: a cloud
from a happier hill on an older day, a kite
unstrung from their father's still
young hands, a summer dress
on the cusp of pale.

they have hit each other;
some memory and bodies.



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