TRUTH

by CONAN TAN

December was unnecessary. The rain
stayed like a prayer. By the window, I saw myself
finished: a lump of clay. The oval-shaped dirt
inside me startled into being. I have never
spent this much time with myself, I said to you
though you had been dead for three months
and gone for longer. I may as well have talked to
a brick in the wall. The wall in the brick. I opened
a door to its conclusion, the well-defined premise
skid off a grave. Its ridge like a brow. The room
heavy enough with air I resembled a person.
Standing was a mercy so I erased my eyes and legs
to become an unlovable worm. Or a rainbow
vaulted over me and I crumbled like a lonely
heel of bread. Who knows. I was obscene
with my logics. If I had a mouth, I had many.
I was a length of privacy and protons when you
tipped over the window ledge like a happy
stack of Jenga. All winter, I convinced the room
I was identical to the loss that made me,
that the clay statue persists because there is nothing
more that could happen to it. I threw the lump
of you into a tree and a bird shook out of its leaves.
I said I could not live without you and I do.

Conan Tan is a Singaporean Chinese poet based in the UK. He is a finalist for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and 2025/26 Magma Poetry Competition, and the winner of Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, London Writers’ Centre, and elsewhere. He is a Philosophy, Politics and Economics undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Read more at conantan.com.

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