Welts are Lovebites
Karen Leong
(she/her)
Welts are Lovebites is a poetry collection written during the Sydney lockdown. It is organised around the staleness of self-love and attempts to capture the brevity of feeling in-place as in my own body, and how these corporeal tensions are upbraided by race and dysmorphia.
Gadigal Country
On the cutting floor
somewhere on a grassy knoll
I will find myself with the taste of metal
on blue battered lips
the sky was spoilt milk
and static fringed the edge
swimming into frame
‘round the corner of a last standing
lap
until legs
gave way under
buckling in the fine-mist of spring
a betrayal of two kinds:
yoplait bypassing lunch
did not carry me past the line
I count hairs
on lumbering gait legs
clamber
over my still-beating body
sometimes, fourteen
is not emerging from
mile run heat
dead first as before
Be it PE shorts soiled on muddied tarp
half-melted kinder bar pressed
against your thigh
thinking dazedly of a runner’s high
now when I falter
sit in thrall at the self shrinkage, (I might need a shrink)
Her pruning form materialises —
with the ghost of victory still
warm on her breath
somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow,
I land clean on my feet
fetching
this is a world of pretty girls
sometimes i am one of them
Creamy, wisp and thistle's teeth
garlands inlaid for the setting sun
every letter
of love trembles in wake of feeling like today
I am a pretty girl
adopting airs of fancy
while i take blow by blow
paw softly at the face
pried loose for only
myself to see
heft fingers around my wrist
remember three times a day
i need to feel something like full
now don’t start getting ideas!
threaten to spill
bowing three times
remember pretty was feet scrubbed raw
Bound in tiny parcels
counterfeit liberation for the tightrope women
descending before me
now my world is full of pretty girls
within reach, we pepper the screens
slash through convention
wring pretty from textures
made haste to abandon
remember I come from a line
where pretty is a garnish
dancing on water,
a two-pronged sword
welts are love bites
With a tender teething heart,
I pry the dead fly from my palm. unseal its mulched body,
set against mine
sometimes my vision whites out dragging with it
chaffs of wheat-like hair.
everything is unsticking:
Feel the coiled thrum of once was come undone
my mother is on the screen.
cutting in and out a gimmicky concern over dial tone
If you want me to be happy you should be happy
the days wilt like fresh sheared flowers — browning til the very
last
moment. drop into a curtsey, collecting on the floor
today I text a friend: the weather is nice cram each drop of good into
dappled leaves I feel nothing has become porous
can I chase the sun? charge full throttle
heel my steps with a purpose no longer felt
towards the out the great expanse
Peggy lee croons. me and my shadow
I feel mine at the navel
Hooked, deft-like softening my fall
when did i start to blunder
this two-step medley of time scrabbled tiles
one strong gust of wind
could have me keeled
sic on this body
Bites sprinkled in between
one step man cha-cha
two step bug and twist
stop drop,
rolled into one — sometimes this body moves
lovingly On its own