Bandung Funeral
The left eyeball of a glimmering salmon
that holy opal, staring back, before the blade
*
Sugarcane ice
along the Citarum River, a boy slurps fresh juice as
his grandfather hauls the chopped stalks on his back
*
Amah’s door-to-door durian deliveries
tucking spare change into red envelopes while her baby’s baby
Chicka Chicka Boom Booms in a foreign classroom
*
Kopitiam tables
gossip in Bahasa
prayers in Hokkien
*
Postpartum rituals
massages on teak wood mats
papaya seeds and ginger root
belly kisses in a September monsoon
*
Mama’s pack of Sampoernas
exchanged at that old man’s warung
smoke hideaways in paddy fields
burnt matches flicked into muddy water
*
Lightning strikes
above tangled mangroves, overlooked
by Dewi Ratih, ruler of the moon
*
Papa’s motorbike
greased and guttering, careful as he rides through
the night market, streets overflowing with hot frying oil
*
Golden anklets
once wrapped around an infant’s wrist
*
Ngaben
means 'turning into ash'
we collect her baby’s dust and bones,
we eat rice with sambal, we sit together
*
Bathing
After the nocturnal drive, half-tanked and chugging northward,
after the reuse of dirty laundry, parking lot smoke break,
and the aftershock of cheap caffeine, we slip into a motel bathtub,
our wrinkled fingertips on each other’s hips as if peeling
the flesh of winter loquats or sweet milk candy and you tell me
in a whisper below the persistent drip of a leaky faucet
about the dream where we run into each other at eighty and eighty-one—
the silvering of strands, new crinkles and calluses
but those same umber irises, stick-and-poke on skin.
Will I find you as I find you today, shriveled and skinny, wiser
yet still weary? Hidden from the cold moon, I rinse your hair
as splotches of dye blossom neon blue across the tub.
In the dewy decay, our hands are warm and fragile,
weathering as morning glazes through the blinds.
It reminds me of a sad and beautiful impermanence.
I drain the bath. Our muscles turn rigid, and this being alive
feels a bit like riverbanks resisting drought. We bundle up
in yesterday’s clothes and return to an unbruised juncture.
The clock breaks when I touch you.
Lora Supandi (she/they) is a poet of Hokkien-Indonesian descent. She received her BA & MA from Stanford University, where she was a Levinthal scholar in poetry. Through the diaristic and the imagined, they experiment with the possibilities of radical futurism, post-imperialist landscapes, and unseen intimacies. Lora yearns for liberation.