𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐁𝐔𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐒 featured in the Crossings section in Issue 72 of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine—Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (editorial) ◎ Eliot Weinberger ◎ Andrea Lingenfelter ◎ Michael Stalcup ◎ Gloria Au Yeung ◎ Keziah Cho ◎ Arthur Solway ◎ Arthur Solway ◎ Ankur Jyoti Saikia ◎ Noel Christian Moratilla ◎ Jhio Jan Navarro ◎ Jonathan Chan ◎ Yee Heng Yeh ◎ Catherine Edmunds ◎ Brylle B. Tabora ◎ Jennifer Eagleton ◎ Charlie Ng ◎ Gayle Dy ◎ Alvin Pang ◎ Aiden Heung ◎ F. Y. Gabriel ◎ DESMOND Francis Xavier KON Zhicheng-Mingdé ◎ Polyptech ◎ Marc Nair ◎ Julienne Maui Mangawang ◎ Bob Black ◎ Florence Ng ◎ Kei Gemora ◎ Paola Caronni ◎ Wendelin Law
Serendipity
by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
In August 2022, I was sent to the emergency room at the hospital due to my dangerous physical state—I had a low red blood cell count, low oxygen levels, and my blood sugar levels were also low. My feet were swollen from oedema and I had difficulty breathing. It all happened so fast and having arrived in a new city just a few days before, I was disoriented: time felt fugitive, unforgiving, and I was cold despite the weather being warm, in the mid-20s, piling layers of clothes on me. The first few hours in the ER, when I was lying half-naked and immobile on a gurney, being intubated and having electrocardiogram patches attached to me and tests done to me, were long and agonising, and at the time, it even felt annihilating. I was entirely unprepared for the event—perhaps there was no way to “prepare” when an emergency happens. Later, when I was allowed to sit up and regain some mobility, I felt a great sense of relief that I had a book with me, and luckily, a book that I was enjoying. I tend to only carry around books that delight or enrich me, but I remember that at this particular moment, I appreciated my forethought as if it were a miracle. Here I was, long hours ahead, my phone’s battery dying, and I had a book with plenty of it yet to be read.
The book was Alex Landragin’s genre-bending novel, Crossings, featuring Walter Benjamin and Baudelaire, about individuals passing into each other’s bodies; it accompanied me for the first few days of that uneasy confinement. It is a book that can be read either “conventionally”, from the first page to the last, or you can follow a special sequence in which the chapters are jumbled—the reader can hop back and forth across the pages.
I was delighted when, serendipitously, the editor-in-chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine proposed to have “Crossings” as the theme of the English-language section of Issue 72 of the publication. We almost always come up with a topic together, via sporadic text messages over the course of a few days. This time though, when the topic was suggested, I instantly said yes. Aside from the coincidence that I happened to be reading a novel on the very subject, the theme resonated with me—the notion of people crossing borders, be they physical, linguistic or affiliative, since time immemorial, and also the crossings profound and enormous or minute that each of us undertake are all ripe for exploration. Crossings would do for our humble magazine.
We received many submissions. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising; as I suspected, crossings proved to be a fertile topic, sparking a wide range of interpretations. And in this special feature the subjects are manifold: a poem results from crossing out words in a censored social media post; eleven selections inspired by the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu; poems about being a young Chinese-Filipino woman, about life decisions, metaphorical journeys, heterotopic spaces, crossing from this world to the next, the excesses of Artificial Intelligence that transgress human control and machine agency; poems that describe the crossings of places, the passage of time, the cruelty of history.
In drama theory, a plot’s complication or conflict comes after the play’s setting and main characters are introduced and generally accompanies the introduction of an object or a person incongruent to the current situation: someone from the past, even a ghost; an old physical object—perhaps a letter—thought long lost, bearing secrets; or an inconvenient truth now uncovered. The complications and conflicts are moments of crossings: past folding into present, hidden realities turning public. In these poems we see the unveiling of crossings and complications variously rendered—each occurrence a mini-drama. I am reminded of Alex Landragin’s words: “Every crossing adds a lifetime of memories”.
聲韻詩刊 Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine 