Postcolonial Man

by Conan Tan

I was a ribbon of land. He bit my nose
like a claim. Area of an inch. I inched

from lawn to rumpus like a bad game
of telephone. I wanted to kiss his phone

screen, place my lips where his ear
had died. Like a Van Gogh & his

prostituted paint. Muse, lover, whatever
prison you want to call it. He was a dual

point of view. Touched me here, here & here
like a door handle. Walked through the portal

of a continent’s placenta. Abort, a port.
I wanted the solitary. He wanted my body

like a spoon of light. He was a mirror reflecting
mirror. Shifted my kaleidoscopic perspective.

Threat of hourglass. I had a fractal pattern of
romancing the wrong wars. Is it bad I liked it

at first, unlacing into spider veins? The follow
through, threw. Against the wall, I shattered

soft  as pillow when he called me his first 
& fifteenth flower. I wanted to disappear.

My eyes got in the way. Suddenly I saw what
the light was for. The subject matter. Do not,

donut. Hole, whole. Still as life. I saw it all.

Conan Tan is a queer Singaporean Chinese poet and undergraduate at the University of Oxford. He is the recipient of the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize, a finalist in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize, and the winner of Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems appear in Pleiades, Salt Hill, The Journal, Cincinnati Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Find out more at conantan.com.