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

fiction

September 2013

Seiobo There Below

László Krasznahorkai

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

September 2013

1 KAMO-HUNTER Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the...

poetry

October 2015

Two Poems

Robert Herbert McClean

poetry

October 2015

Another Autumn Journal Chaos (AKA Do Not Put This to Music Because You’re How Fish Put Up a Fight)...

Interview

June 2011

Interview with Jorge Semprun

TR. Jacques Testard

Pierre Testard

Gwénaël Pouliquen

Interview

June 2011

The great Spanish-born writer Jorge Semprún died on Tuesday 8 June 2011 in Paris, aged 87. A Spanish Civil...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required