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

feature

Issue No. 10

What Can an Art Magazine Be?

Orit Gat

feature

Issue No. 10

What can an art magazine be? Today, as the publishing industry reassesses its role in the age of the internet,...

Art

Issue No. 14

Lenin was a Mushroom

Thomas Dylan Eaton

Art

Issue No. 14

Cast as the ‘savage, ugly’ part in the Popular Mechanics live show, Necrorealists were radical artists in their own...

poetry

November 2011

Cooper's Hawk

Elyse Fenton

poetry

November 2011

My breath’s the wind’s breathless down-stroke hasty claw like the gnarred finger of juniper just now clambering for a...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required