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

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Tom McCarthy

Fred Fernandez Armesto

Interview

Issue No. 1

For those expecting him to be, as the New Statesman called him, ‘the most galling interviewee in Britain’, Tom...

fiction

December 2016

The Giving Up Game

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter....

poetry

Issue No. 3

Two Poems

Rebecca Wolff

poetry

Issue No. 3

I approach a purchase adore my children— back away— that they revere ugliness the rainbow bag that holds a...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required