Runner Up for the 2022 Grierson Verse Prize
Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and a teacher from Hong Kong, currently reading the MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. She is a WrICE fellow, awardee of the William Hunter Sharpe Memorial Scholarship and a mentee of Roddy Lumsden Memorial Mentorship. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Rialto, Berfrois, diode, The Margins, ANMLY, Cicada Magazine, Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Weekly Poem, Cordite Poetry Review, Ricepaper, among others. She is working on maintaining eye-contact during conversations, chapbooks which explore Hong Kong’s various vistas, as well as desire and rituals through the lens of tattooing.
Connect with Tim Tim
Website: timtimcheng.com
SHE WILL
after the movie Shell (2012) by Scott Graham
A car crash is just touching
too much—the father
scurries into the headlight
like the roadkill he butchers, the meat
his daughter cooks reluctantly.
Shock is when you eat
and bite into the membrane
of your lips instead—the daughter
darts from his bed, bruised
like whatever fruit her body isn’t.
You, lit-up by your screen,
choke up on the daughter’s cry:
how stories are the last refuge
of mistakes. Things unwanted in life
could just live there. The father,
the daughter, shelled in their motherless wild,
take turns to push each other’s
kisses away—they do what they do
just to show you how far
things could carry over.
But what about the day,
just that one day your father
cries, telling you things
you think only your mother
should know. He edges too close
by your bed. His temperature,
an omen. The ear you lend him
forcibly opened. Your panic
is a burst kitchen pipe
your father fails to stop—
you escape for the first time,
wearing a plain, white shirt,
wondering if you’re mistaken
for your mother. You live inside a hotel
mirror. This man, another man
you barely know, whose hands run all over
your insecurities, is sound asleep
like a foetus—how do you tell
what is and what isn’t until
you watch the daughter outrun her past.
