"Self Portrait as a Shadow", Conan Tan
CW: self harm, suicide, depression and homophobic slurs
In another dream just like this one, you belonged to me. You, and that tide pool reflection. That's how things were before everything hemorrhaged as the ocean. Summer of ’99 when the morning had set sail and I was sissy with a conch shell. That’s what they called me then.
They still do. Some nights, it’s piercing
as a paper cut. Sharp as thoughts like:
If a boy calls me a faggot, but no one
is around to hear it, why does it still hurt?
Like storm in a teacup except I prefer coffee. Or the taste of rope against neck, strangling the Thursdays into anniversaries. It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t be there anyway. Tea’s fine as it is: bitter,
like a third-degree burn.
The other night, when my mother asked what I wanted for dinner, I didn’t know how to say I wanted it to be my last. So let me cut it into words for the breathing.
Cruel, isn’t it? How the poet
must write about a body
they are homeless in. How
his shadows arrive as they
always do,
in second place.
Some days, to get by, I imagine you are as miserable as I am. That the grief is still taut around your nape, your hand covered in scratches, trying to erase the parts I used to hold. Failing to. Someday, that tide pool will no longer reflect our faces.
And sometimes, the body just needs help dying.
/ Conan Tan (he/they) has too much trauma they spin into poems. These poems have been published in Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review and QLRS among others. Most notably, he was the winner of the 2022 National Poetry Competition for his poem 'Prodigal'.
/ COMMENTARY
“It takes a lot of bravery, vulnerability and above all, commitment and skill to write so viscerally yet precisely about trauma and pain like this. I like how poet used the experimental nature of the form to keep the reader on their toes, elevating the poem beyond a stream of consciousness type of piece. I also appreciate the sea / tide pool imagery. ”