Poetry by Ling Lim

    Kevin Toews CC




STOMACHACHE

The year after I got my period I was
wheeled out of the hospital after my mother 
forced me to sit on a distressed toilet, insisting that 
my cramps were just food poisoning, I thought then 
that if my own mother wouldn’t believe in my pain then 
who was ever going to, or maybe I am confused, again, 
about two identical memories of the devil himself 
chomping down on my uterus, because that same year 
I ate a dirty granola bar before my father drove us in circles
around a mountain to higher altitudes where the theme parks 
and casinos are; we stopped at a turnout for me to throw up, 
my brother danced around my bent vomiting body, 
his steely fingers poked the quaking fat on my stomach,  
you are what you eat, he had chanted
& later, I was left with no choice but to run circles 
around the school compound and starve myself so that 
my stomach would stop hurting, which reminded me of
when my older sister and I were babies and a year apart, 
how we had slathered saliva on our prepubescent bodies, 
laughing like wild pebbles in a tempestuous stream, 
unaware of the fury that will meet our flesh when we  
grow into little women. 

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MY LOVER, THE MARINE

I felt like a ghost. He looked right through me. There is a sense of recognition when someone sees you. You’re a wall, and they stop right before they walk into you, abrupt and definitive. Often, he’d walk right through me. He smoked, sending rings of smoke into the gloom of the skies, leaning against his blue 2001 Subaru Outback. He only saw me when I touched him, a tap on his shoulder, a peck on his frosted cheek. Then we went inside and opened bottles of champagne. He used to smash berries in my glass, painting my drink with blood. I thought it was romantic. Once I couldn’t find him anywhere. When I did, he was tucked in the corner of the bar across the street, swaying to the memories he kept hidden. Hey, he said immediately when he saw me, unusually alert. I carried his limp body in my arms, the whole time he talked about how he shouldn’t be alive, how all his friends had died in Iraq. At home, I stripped his damp clothes off. A knife strapped to his calf. Why do you need this, I asked. Ghosts are everywhere, he said, looking directly into my eyes.




Ling Lim is a Malaysian writer. A perpetual immigrant, Ling leans on writing as her steadfast companion, weaving her search for belonging in foreign cities into her prose poems and essays. Her work can be found in porchlit mag. She currently lives in San Francisco. 
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