Christian yeo Xuan

First Day

—after Laetitia Keok

In this one we are just shy of eighteen

and both still wearing glasses.

When you walk into the room, I feel

the air go out of it. When I tell you

this later, near the end of my grief,

if such a border exists, you say,

that’s the least original thing you’ve ever said.

It’s also true. In this one

nothing has happened yet:

we have not embarked on envisioning

the permanency of our life together,

we are not yet who we said

we would become, and in seeing

the clarity of you across an ice cream shop

I feel as if I understand terrifyingly

what it might mean to love someone

more than you love yourself,

your body, the world.

In this one I research volleyball to

talk to you and you are already

straight-shooting.

I want what you want,

I dream what you dream.

I know all this is still sentiment,

and I know everyone has a great love,

but how tragic is it that it happens

when we still believe in all of it?

In this one I am not yet me

and you are not yet you.

So then, there is just us.

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Statement of Homage

Lae (as her friends call her) is a poet I don’t hesitate to say feels generational: she writes, in the words of one of her NYU contemporaries Yi Wei, “the most breathless love poems [she’s] ever read”. Her work embodies the clean, sparse, immaculate line, and it contains a clarity so truthful it sometimes feels hard to look directly into it. Her play with timescapes and spatiality is always moving, so too with the intersections between materiality and virtuality; or, in as many words, ideas and memory.

Lae is also first among my readers and sister of my soul, one of my dearest friends and evidence that sharp, sudden, kindred coalescences persist beyond adolescence and endure into adulthood. We first met at a Food Junction at the basement of Ion Orchard in Singapore because I’d asked her about an internship that didn’t exist, and we talked for several hours (I was hungover and needed fish soup, she was not and didn’t) about several things, but mostly really just about Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water. Since then, our Telegram chats have been filled with poems from Marie Howe, Victoria Chang, Catherine Barnett, Jean Valentine, Chen Chen, and Louise Gluck, blah blah blah, not to say anything of the baseball caps and tattoos and memes, still lives of everyday silliness.

I must admit that in some instances if the concept of artistic community as ecosystem of care is to be an actual salve and not aesthetic mantlepiece, it is not working for me. But in the web of gentle relations that exists between Lae and I and our writer friends, many of whom have now left to chase their dreams in the cosmopolitan artistic capitals of the Global North, the thing that keeps coming back to me is sincerity. We were goofy friends first, but to have an intellectual and artistic inspiration simultaneously as one of one’s dearest is an honour, and certainly one I don’t take for granted.

Laetitia Keok

Laetitia Keok (laetitia-k.com) is a writer and editor from Singapore whose practice explores personal and collective grief as frameworks of care. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and the Nina Riggs Poetry Award, and anthologised in New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022). Some of her recent works have also appeared in Diode Poetry Journal, Wildness Journal, and X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, amongst others. She edits for NYC-based literary press, Gaudy Boy, and international Sino creative arts magazine, Sine Theta Magazine. A recent graduate of Nanyang Technological University, Laetitia holds a BA in English with a minor in Creative Writing. Currently based in New York City, she is an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University, supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore. She loves light.

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