This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.
Island
Before I was born, the sea rolled up to my grandparents’ house, but the view I knew was the strip of asphalt beyond the barbed wire. The garden was overgrown with mango, guava, and jackfruit we picked ripe off the branches, the sole rambutan that could not bear fruit, the coconut decaying from within. I caught butterflies. I flicked my wrist, pressed their small brown wings. They left skeins of powder on my fingers. Then I let them go. I imagined the sea rose and flooded the garden. The coconut fell and bobbed in the waves, too dry and hard to eat, the shell broken only by a knife.
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.
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