perhappened mag
issue 8: LOVERS
self-portrait as
ways i have loved you
LAETITIA KEOK
As muscle memory. Mid-air and without knowing. Gravity tugging weary at a sky brimming collapse. As your dogs. That I could never tell apart. Whose names I always forgot. As sun/moon/rising. Or whatever you used to say. As playlists. My best ones. A song trying to reach you—you, unreachable. As baby bird falling out of a nest. Only to be touched by a girl. Only to become unrecognisable. As a story that leaks through my fingers, coated a residue of grief. As a truth halved. Then halved again. As a friend, spinning earthquake from your third disappearance. As a lover, flinching at every imagined touch. As heaven. Or its inverse. As a girl, stumbling into gunpoint for you—always. As the fish from my childhood, dead in 3 days. As your hands, swallowing. As mine, swallowed. As a moth, flitting to an impossible light. As your mother tongue, different from mine. A love held, at the distance of three languages. As if resuscitating an ocean. As the syllables of my name pulsing, unsaid, against your throat. As a loneliness, stretched, and finally unhinged, dripping metal of leaving. As a gutted animal splayed out on a mattress beside you. Soaked. In a dream. In Paris. Inconsolable.
Laetitia Keok is a poet, writer & English Literature major from Singapore. Her work has been published in Vagabond City Lit, Diode Poetry Journal & elsewhere. You can find her at laetitia-k.com.