The mosquito bites
White hot, pouting in protest
I will ignore you.
Hot Lips, a haiku
Category: Poetry
Thursday, 3pm
Last year, the writing group that I’m part of asked for submissions for a Sputnik creative project, ‘What is it to be Human’. I submitted this for inclusion into their anthology of short stories and poems and it was accepted. You can buy the whole creative pack here or download the e-book for free, if you want.
I deliberately left it a year before posting this poem. When honesty shakes up a friendship, some things are better left carefully tucked away to rest so that the friendship can recover and forge forward in a new way. And then, at some point, when it’s healthy, I think these moments can be shared.
I remember that I found writing this therapeutic and surprisingly making myself write it in iambic pentameter was helpful: the discipline required in da DUM da DUM da DUM, forced me to take the time to work through each painful moment for what it was. Normally I lack the patience to do that, but I convinced myself that this was an one-off – much like the conversation below! As one of my friends remarked after the event, “It’s not like you’re planning to have these kinds of conversations on a daily basis!”
Indeed not!
But how necessary, it was. And how my heart soared free, thereafter.
THURSDAY, 3PM.
They say that the heart is purely muscle
Beating, pumping, pushing blood through highways
of capillaries and veins. Coursing life
into every member of the body.
It has four chambers. The two small ones are
called atria and the larger ones are
ventricles. The aortic valve is
what controls the flow of blood out of the
left ventricle to the aorta
(the body’s main artery). I learned all
of this in biology. So, how then –
as I’m sitting opposite you, waiting
for my drink to arrive. “Carrot shake, please” –
Does it know to pump doubly hard, rush blood
upwards to my face. Cause my palms to sweat,
hands tremble so I have to sit on them.
Somehow, it has guessed it’s impending fate.
Ah, here’s the drink. “Thank you.” Sip. Swallow.
Breath. Out. In. Steady. I need slow, sure words.
This is a delicate operation.
It will require all my skill to cut
out my heart, in one piece, adeptly
manoeuvre it from the ribbed darkroom where
feelings develop. Reveal my heart to
you so that you understand. And I don’t
have to repeat this ordeal again.
Ever! “I like you, a lot.” Words spill out,
clattering across the table like
loose change, stunning you. Eyes widen. Dumbstruck,
Your swift ripostes rendered suddenly mute.
My eyes hold yours steady and assure you,
I’m serious. Your lips make to move, but
you stop and try to work and rework out
what to say and how. I know your answer
already. I want to tell you that. And
as you laugh in nervousness. I join in.
An Evening Walk in Phsar Doeum Thkov
I’ve joined this writing group and the first assignment was to write a poem in iambic pentameter (penta, means 5. iambs, that’s a unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, think daDUM. So iambic pentameter is 5 sets of iambs). They gave us some lines to start us off. I found the exercise much trickier than I thought it would be. In the end, I wrote something but it felt like it was fitting a square peg in a round hole.
So, I’ve unpegged it. And let the lines run free. I think they feel better for it. I’ve tried to keep the ending in iambic pentameter. A bit of discipline never went amiss.
It’s a bit dark… but it was sort of inspired by the upcoming 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.
*Phsar Doeum Thkov is the neighbourhood where I live in Phnom Penh.
An evening walk in Phsar Doeum Thkov*
These streets have no name. They’re just numbers on a map.
Street five hundred is mine.
I walk them as sun sets.
Five-0-two is next.
Dogs shake off hot sun,
stretch and yap at my feet.
I don’t like it.
5-0-4 is cheerfully lined with white, pink and yellow
frangipani trees. I’d linger but,
for the dogs. Besides, I’m meant to be doing exercise.
There, a huge white house stands behind
iron gates. Next door, a wooden shack.
Do the neighbours talk to one another?
These nameless streets hold innumerable,
unsaid, unspoken, memories. Walls, Stones,
dare I ask, what happened? Who fell? When? Who
cowered? Cried? Wept? Died? How? Bludgeoned? Shot? Who
survived? What? And can they grieve now? Or do
unspeakable acts of terror haunt them?
As sun sets? As the dark draws in. I wonder.
Mosquito, a haiku
I went away on holiday with five friends to the sleepy seaside town of Kep (pronounced Gaip), in Cambodia recently. I forgot to take my journal with me and I felt like I couldn’t do any meaningful reflection without it, as I wouldn’t be able to write it down.
Instead, I chose to write down a few poems that I’ve been mulching on for pretty much a year. Actually, pretty much the entire time that I’ve been in Cambodia. They’re all about mosquitoes. Here’s the first one.
It’s a haiku for no other reason, than that’s how it came out. I had this image in my mind, of a squadron of mosquitoes flying in formation at night, getting ready to attack. Mosquitoes don’t hunt in packs; it can sure feel like it when you have multiple bites within 5 minutes. Why stealth fighters? The peculiar thing about Cambodian mosquitoes is, is their silence.
You have to imagine the venom in my voice towards the mosquitoes as I’m saying it.
Mosquito
stealthy night fighter,
flying under the radar,
leaving pock-marked skin.
Gasping
Talk about ghosts of the past. I found this poem biding it’s time in my drafts folder while I was looking for a creative piece of writing. It’s for an anthology that Catalyst are putting together this year. The anthology looks like an exciting creative project.
Can I share a secret with you? I’m a wee bit nervous about posting this poem. See, I’ve posted some poems in past. However, this is the first posting of any very personal poetry that I’ve written. And I’ve gone and written one about love, of all things!
Well, this poem is unpolished. It’s raw. It’s unsophisticated. I tidied it up a bit when I reread it. And yet, I think I want to keep it in this form. I keep being reminded of how much I love poetry for being a medium to express emotion in such an honest way. When I read it now, it takes me right back to the moment when I wrote it. I was trying to work through some issues *laughter* – there’s an understatement – of an unrequited love and an unresolved relationship.
Perhaps, you’ll empathise a little with the pain too.
Gasping
Time has rewritten the history of you.
You are no longer the hand that squeezed my heart
And gripped it, tight.
In fact, my face turned blue
And I felt nothing, for 5 years
I felt nothing. Comatose.
How did I describe it before?
Ah yes. Like I was frozen.
Not all of me.
Just that part of me that falls in love,
And notices the little cobwebs that grow around one’s eyes.
I wanted it to be
someone else’s eyes.
How can I explain it?
Like my heart had been put on hold. A pause button
You pressed.
No, I had let you press
When I couldn’t let go of that idea of us.
Get it?
Pretty good effort from an asphyxiated girl.
Reprieve came with your questions.
Those shock pads that you jollily jumped me with.
(See. You had claim to my frozen heart.
But my lungs were mine and had just been sucked of dreams.
Gasping. That’s when you shocked me.)
It’s summer and there’s somebody else.
He may not fancy me.
But I don’t care. My heart is free from you.
We’re crossing paths again. And,
Suddenly, you’ve become this figure in my future.
And in 30 days when we meet
I want to be “just friends”.
I need to dismantle “us”.
I wish I knew how this poem ends.
I want to know how this poem ends.
Time had written you out of my heart.
But I’ve found the ghost of you lurking and
I don’t how to –
Keep the cold out.
Birmingham New Street Station in a Heatwave
My CELTA course in Birmingham and the summer’s astonishing heatwave have coincided in July 2013. It has meant that I’ve become a rail commuter again and I get to traipse through Birmingham New Street’s revamped station. I rather like its new look.
It’s a shame that they haven’t done anything about the narrow escalators and stairs that connect the platforms and the concourse.
I think that we’d had an input session on teaching writing one morning in which we’d discussed how we could encourage ESL students to write poetry. It reminded me of how I always preferred to write poetry than prose at Korean school when they set their writing competitions: poetry requires minimal words and I was the weakest student in my group. Somehow, I managed to wow someone with my creative outputs and won a few prizes. Ironically, they were dictionaries!
I’ve been reading the Psalms and Norman MacCaig’s poems during my commute. The combination of all these things has culminated in me writing a wee one of my own.
It’s fine really,
until you’re at the top of the stairs and then –
My nose!
My nose!
Assaulted by these people’s
sticky, sweaty,
familiar smells. Their stale scents
stick at the back of my throat.
Descending the steps into
sultry staleness.
Dim, dingy, dirty.
Pining for fresh air.
Stalemate.
Waiting for my shiny steed to whisk me away.
LOOK what I MADE for my MUM!
Choose some flowers
and foliage,
Charm a few canes from the florist.
“Thank-you.”
Get out the strawberry cupcakesI baked earlier.
Now, meringue buttercream is a faff
Poke a hole in the bottom of the cupcakes with the canes.
Make a mess whilst arranging them all – and
Ta DA!
Look what I MADE for my MUM!
– a cupcake bouquet!
p.s. she liked it A LOT! but I don’t think that she wanted to eat it because it looked so nice on the table.
What a cupcake likes…
I don’t aspire to literary greatness or wittiness, which posed a bit of a problem when I had to come up with the wording to put on the attendance certificates for the cupcake workshop (item no. 7 on my 30 for 30 list). My friend Emily put together the prose and Emma did the printing of the posters. I came up with this ditty at 3am on the morning of the cupcake workshop, inspired by Edward Monkton. Do you fancy posting a poetic response?
Said the cupake to [insert your name],
I promise to post more photos, write up another entry on the workshop itself and a cupcake recipe soon. But right now I am still exhausted from Sunday night’s 6 hour cupcake baking marathon. Any guesses what time I went to bed? More on that later.
25th Feb – cupcake recipe added!
10th Mar – workshop added.
Chocolate Chilli Brownies
It has almost been a year since I started this blog and I began it with a poem. Coincidentally, I’m celebrating it’s first anniversary with another one.
I put up a twitter post asking people to guess the mystery ingredient in one of my brownies. They came back with chestnuts, courgettes, chillis… all great ideas… but incorrect. (it was maltesers). The chilli suggestion, however, reminded me of the time I experimented with brownies by adding in chillies. My friend Jen ate one. This was her reaction.
Jen spits it out. Eugh!
“What did you put in this one?”
Chilli Brownies.
Zingy Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake
So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a yellow goblet
of miracles,
I love lemons. My friends will testify to my love affair with lemons. ‘A yellow goblet of miracles’ beautifully describes my imaginations of what I could create with them. I particularly love that zing that lemons add when I use it in baking.
My timing of trying out this recipe was a bit silly really. It was three days before the removal men were coming. My two tubs of soft cheese in my fridge were almost at their expiry date, the sun was out and I needed an excuse to do something other than pack boxes! This lemon and ginger cheesecake seemed like the perfect summer dessert.
I’ve since made two versions of this cheesecake. Version One lacked the lemony zing. It may appeal to the finer palette; I love robust flavours. So, I cheated the second time and added lemon curd to the mixture, which brought out the lemon and complemented the ginger perfectly.
Lemon and Ginger Cheesecake adapted from the Good Food Channel
Ingredients and Method
Ideally use a 25cm springform cake tin and double wrap the outside of it with foil. This is to protect the cheesecake when baking it in a water-bath. I didn’t have a big enough cake tin at the time of baking the cheesecakes. Instead, I made a 20cm and 10 mini cheesecakes. Very cute!
Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas Mark 4/350F
…For the biscuit base
225g digestive biscuits (or if you really like ginger, then substitute it all or partly with ginger biscuits)
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tbsp caster sugar
75g unsalted butter, melted
- Pulse the biscuits in a food processor until they resemble fine crumbs, or bash them up in a bag with a rolling pin. Whichever method suits your mood.
- Add the ground ginger, caster sugar and the melted butter and mix it all up. I’ve already reduced the amount of butter from the recipe so that there is enough butter for the biscuit base to stick together.
- Transfer the biscuit mixture to the cake tin and press it down firmly. If you would also like to make mini ones too, then use a tablespoon of biscuit mixture per cupcake case. I discovered that my mini-tart shaper is perfect for pressing down the biscuit base.
…For the filling
570g cream cheese
100g caster sugar
1 tbsp cornflour
4 large eggs, beaten
grated zest of 3 unwaxed lemons
380ml sour cream
2 tbsp lemon curd, beaten so that it’s a little bit runny, optional but highly recommendable
- Beat the cream cheese and the caster sugar together until smooth in a big bowl.
- Mix in the cornflour.
- Slowly mix the eggs into the mixture, one at a time, so that they are thoroughly mixed in. Don’t worry that the mixture always looks a wee bit peculiar at this stage.
- Pour in the sour cream and add the lemon zest. Gently mix them into the mixture.
- Lemony zing lovers could also add the lemon curd into the mixture at this stage. I put blobs of it on top of the mixture once I had poured the filling into the cake tin. Then I worried that the lemon curd would burn in the oven if it was left on top, so I took a metal chopstick and mixed the lemon curd into the mixture. I’ve since thought about putting 3/4 filling in, putting in a layer of lemon curd, then topping it with cheesecake filling. Essentially you can do whatever you like with it, and I’d really love to hear what worked for you.
- For the mini cheesecake fans – I used 2 teaspoons of the filling for each case.
- Pop it into the oven for about 45 minutes. I think that I baked the mini cheesecakes for 20 minutes. Bake until the middle of the cheesecake is just set. I test it by gently resting my finger on it and the cheesecake is ready when there is no (or barely any) mixture sticking to it.
Top Tip! Cheescakes are best when baked in a moist oven. To achieve this, you can bake the cheesecake in a water-bath by placing the cake tin in a roasting tin and filling the roasting tin with enough hot water so that it reaches about half way up the cake tin. Alternatively you can place a small oven-proof bowl full of hot water on the bottom level of the oven. I’ve used both methods and haven’t noticed any difference to the texture of the cheesecakes. But perhaps a more experienced cheesecake baker could enlighten me?
…Meanwhile, start the topping
250ml sour cream
2 tbsp caster sugar
80g stem ginger, drained and finely chopped
grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon mixed with 1/2 tbsp of sugar
- Mix the sour cream and the caster sugar together.
- Take the cheesecake out of the oven when it’s ready and pour the topping on, arrange the stem ginger on top. The mini cheesecakes appreciate a thin layer of sour cream topping.
- Pop it back in the oven for another 10 minutes, so that the sour cream topping can set.
- When it comes out, immediately run a knife round the edge of the cheesecake. This will help stop the cheesecake from cracking. Also, helpful for when taking the cheesecake out of the tin when serving it up.
- Let the cheesecake cool down for about an hour before popping it into the fridge overnight.
- Sprinkle the sugary lemon zest on top before serving.
Verdict – The combination of lemony zingyness with gingery warmth produces lots of ‘Mmmmms’. It does take some effort but it is a really simple summery dessert to make that is a crowd-pleaser. I’m pleased to say that my friend’s children ate some and then asked for seconds. Winner! The cheesecake is best eaten a day or two after it is made so that it stays soft. But I always seem to make too much cheesecake in one go, so I’d appreciate any tips on freezing it.