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

February 2014

Interview with Lisa Dwan

Rosie Clarke

Interview

February 2014

In a city where even the night sky is a dull, starless grey, immersion in absolute darkness is a...

Art

November 2014

Conversations About a Play

Louise Stern

Art

November 2014

Editor’s note: The images in the slideshow document a conversation on paper between the writer and artist Louise Stern...

fiction

March 2014

The Nothing on Which the Fire Depends

Micheline Aharonian Marcom

fiction

March 2014

Friday 9 November 2009   The coffee is lukewarm, but she doesn’t mind to drink it this way. She...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required