Site icon The Sundress Blog

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

sundresspublications 
This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Faraway Places

Desire makes us face ourselves. The selves
we keep at bay want to break out of our bodies.

I wonder if the saying that women cannot read maps is meant
to keep us from venturing out on our own.

Maps are guides to our dreams,
where we want to go and who we want to be.

I heard a crack that sounded
like a thunderbolt, but it was not the sky.

Dust blows in the wind to faraway places, washed
out to sea and rolled back to shore.

Maps hold the stories of our lives, a record
of journeys into the unknown.

I leave it for the waves to reclaim, the sand to fill,
the hole I make in my wake.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

Latest posts by sundresspublications (see all)
Exit mobile version