2 Poems – Suzanne Pemberton (Canada)

Cooking Show: Secrets of the Baba Nonya

Pulling out bits of this gutted fish flesh
which lies upon the chopping board
The fish has been deboned
The skeleton taken out

You can use a spoon to scrape the flesh from the skin
pinky white sticky lumps
If you smash it in a pestle
add some seasonings,
salty dried sole for  that smoky reminiscent taste
You can make fish balls
Make them, cook them, eat them
or give them to someone else
to eat

Or you can use your fingers to tear out those bits
already turning orangey with memory now
–and pink and white and flesh–
and you can affix them in an order
or no order
to a translucent frame
and let the sun shine on them

Think how pretty and quivering and raw they’ll look at first
held,
with a little sunlight showing you each vein
Pearly flesh,
the smell still fresh fish alive
Carrying the tang of desire

And after that?
We tend to forget
The stench of rot’s still change

.

Zingeberales

Though it’s unseemly
of one of my sex to say,
cannot help but get a hard-on
in the Garden
Bo-ta-ni-ca

Everything scented,
fresh,
or in ripe decay

This is inside that,
this emerged from this,
these reaching for each other,
these entwined

Red ginger poking out her cheeky bud
and here another, another
each one with bold lip or tongue or bud
ready to burst

Here mushroom
with it’s frilled edges
and breast-nub umbrella top
trembling moist in the just about to rain

Upturned half a seed pod,
New Year’s red
with yellow trim
sticky wrinkled inside.
empty and open

New green leaves. triumphant,
straight-standing,
each small new one facing one old
in a dialogue between youth’s cocky strength
and age’s weary wisdom

And this brown cup,
outside speaking of death,
a marvelously pointed pentagon
–and inside! Five furred feathers of the softest stuff
To touch, to look—
Enough!

.

Suzanne Pemberton (b. 1963) was born in Canada, has lived in The United States, England and Singapore and now resides in Stockholm, Sweden. A global nomad by happenstance, she is interested in issues of migration, language and culture. She is a teacher of English as an Additional Language and was involved with performance poetry during her time in Singapore.

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