You breathed my name into the air I never knew I existed until then

by Trina Tan

Maybe we exist only in exhalations maybe
there is no us. Maybe we are six billion people
surviving on the voices of (six minus one) billion people
each of our breaths a consequence of
someone else uttering our names in stories of
sometime adventures. There is no gravity we exist in a flux
of cause and effect. Suspended in the middle of cotton quilt
and stone graphite we are always reaching towards the red-hot baton of
another’s sorrows, they say warm air rises and we are not cold. Our names
condense in the winter and crystallize into signboards of love the way
angels clothe themselves in air, navigating us into one another’s arms. (Today
I met a man who pinched nail-deep into his elbow every ten minutes
to stop the pain and I imagined that
no one had uttered his name in a long time.) I thought maybe
this is why poets say they are immortal maybe
God is powerful simply because so many people have uttered His name
since time immemorial maybe
the moments I felt I could not breathe was the result of someone
censoring my name from the screening of a filmstrip memory. There is only
a world whose song is a recurrence relation of an infinite number of names
articulated in a finite number of breaths. We die the moment
our names are said for the last time, our souls finding
a deficit of memory and there is little choice but to default upon
bankruptcy. There is no life or death no rich or poor        only
the number of breaths we have conquered        only
the melody of our names on
each other’s lips.

Sleep

by Trina Tan

It is the limbo between the parentheses
of waking up or living.
People say it is some sort of conjured darkness,
of time lost, of things foregone,
of winter’s cold joy and bears hibernating.
People say it is for the weak.
They forget that just as we feed into the strains of our eyelids
to keep up the quick erratic breathing
and the litheness of our feet
we need to feed into the silence of our deafening
imagination
and the need for our feet to step off the ground
for a while longer than a second.

So it lies between us, the illuminating darkness,
an entity with limbs, the barometer of health we overlook.
The slight twitching of our hands against each other
triggers off earthquakes in an unknown somewhere.
We feed into a cache of things unremembered,
things we forget to believe when we are awake.
And as we dream, it grows,
enveloping us with the fabric of sewn-together
joys and tragedies,
filling the gaps that the air has left
between the curves of our bodies
and the roundness of our souls.

The bears, they wake up,
rubbing off the remnants of their dreams
which had crystallized in the corners of their eyes
as if reality had gone on its knees to beg for some.