Anniversary in A Major and Other Poems

By Alison Clara Tan

Mie Yim, Howl, 2023. Oil on canvas, 77 x 55 inches.
Image description: Vertical canvas with a gigantic central eye peering from behind red and pink wave-like shapes against a dark backdrop of silouetted tree branches.

Anniversary in A Major

Suture the night, the vol-au-vents. God on high,

see her stopper the wind with the shame,

the man on his knees by the cello, proffering a throat

lit up with honesty, false and bright as a song.

She retches jazz into her crocodile handbag,

watches the indigo flecks dry on her hands.

The guests guillotine wine bottles, see them

wave like light through the foyer, strum the hairs

of artichokes. They double back: his fist parts the floorboard;

topples their vows into the pinball machine.

Lights up: she curls her ribs over the crème brûlée

and sears her eyelids all in blues. By the jacaranda tree

he rolls his sleeves, smears a fist across her eeling lips.

Now the red silk peeling from her skin

like a heart ungloving. The summer moves again.

No night bird screams.

---

Mie Yim, Rhizome, 2024. Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 inches.
Image description: A constellation of fuzzy shapes in pinks, greens, turquoise, and red, outlined with black web-like roots, and a central oval area like a colorful patchwork quilt.

Ode to the chip in my front tooth from years of biting down on my finger skin

Look at me, with my hands

deep in the carcass, the smacking

suck of boiled vowels in my

mouth, dry as the deserts

between metacarpal and

phalange, and here I am

craving the tessitura of tulips

on my teeth, the crunch

of living things. Round the valleys

of my frontal lobe, dark fins 

pierce the earth. Hands, 

dramatise me: I am a gun 

rocking into the maw 

of a sunlit country on its back,

you know as well as I do:

you are the land. I am

the loosening.

---

Mie Yim, Lodestar, 2025. Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 inches.
Image description: An all-over composition of connected starbursts reminiscent of fireworks in bright whites and pale yellows against a backdrop of pinks, red, and dark violet.

Eve

First published in perhappened mag (an online journal now defunct).

It will take you by surprise: a warmth in your chest,

a sunbeam in your bathroom mirror, a drop of honey

from a bird’s beak. Not after the years in which

you cradled womanhood like shrapnel to your chest,

your prize of war the taint of touch in the darkness.

I have seen you mutate in the compost of your closet:

a razor of light, a lipstick, a beanie, feral thing

in a silk skirt. I have seen you at the windowsill

wearing sleeplessness like a lace veil, aching

to plead the euphoria of birds. Go, then – O girl,

O derivative of, gather up these snowflake-

tender bones and keen them into flight. 

Someday you will learn to reach into the back door

of your body and fling it open. Someday you will learn

that wholeness was just a trick of the light. 

---

Alison Clara Tan is a Southeast Asian writer based in London. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in fourteen poems, The Comstock Review, Oyster River Pages, and is highly commended in The Passionfruit Review 2025 Here and Now Contest.

*

Mie Yim (b. 1963, S. Korea) is a painter based in New York. She holds a BFA in Painting from Philadelphia College of Art and studied in Rome with the Tyler School of Art year abroad program. Yim has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and Sharpe Walentas studios, and has been awarded grants by Pollock Krasner Foundation, Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed, NYFA, and the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Market Place program. Her solo exhibitions include: Pace University, NY; Lehmann Maupin, NY; Michael Steinberg, NY; Brattleboro Museum, VT; Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, China; Villa Magdalena, San Sebastian, Spain; and Basel Social Club at the Beverly Holz, Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions that include Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Canada Gallery, Drawing Center, Feature, Ise Cultural Foundation, Mitchell Algus Gallery, BRIC, Mark Borghi Gallery (all in NY); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Unit, London, UK; and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. Her work is held in numerous public collections, notably JPMorgan Chase, Nelsons Atkins Museum of Art, and Weatherspoon Art Museum. 

---