Jennifer Wong

Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep.

I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections, filled in with radio music    tarmac skirting streetlight and         the dissolving      moon. Wing mirrors tell of running trees. My heart races in the heave of the wind. In the pivot of glass everything is so small and manageable. I think of an old song, of purple cows in far fields, I wonder what it’d take to cover miles and miles with no maps or destination. It is not easy anymore to forget or be free of the bear that roams the place where I come from.

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk        floor        lamp        flowers tatami, my underwear then dares to paw across Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious. Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music tells me that suffering is necessary and more powerful than healing and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins. I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind: these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.