share


Monopoly (after Ashbery)

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed.
I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye.
I never eat cake in case of global meltdown.
I am my own consolation.

I have a troubled relationship with material things:
I drop my coppers smugly in the river.
(I do everything with an unbearable smugness.)
I propose a vote of thanks.

I make small errors in your favour. Sometimes
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I won second prize in a beauty contest.
I am yellowing at the edges.

I was last seen drawing the short straw.
I hang about tragically on street corners, where
I hand out cards that read: if you see
I am struggling to lift this card, please, do not help me.

 

 


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

is a Hong Kong-born poet and academic. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize. She teaches poetry at King’s College London.


READ NEXT

fiction

August 2013

How to Be an American

Will Heinrich

fiction

August 2013

Begin with a man on the beach. The sea is strangely iridescent, lighter in its lights and blacker in...

feature

August 2013

The Ghosts of Place

Dylan Trigg

feature

August 2013

 ‘So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had...

feature

October 2013

A World of Sharp Edges: A Week Among Poets in the Western Cape

André Naffis-Sahely

feature

October 2013

In Antal Szerb’s The Incurable, the eccentric millionaire Peter Rarely steps into the dining car of a train steaming...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required