This commission is excerpted from a manuscript I put together in the course of a residency, a work that employs deconstructed cartography, textual collage and lyric essay. It is
tentatively titled  SQUANDERER. SQUANDERER speaks to a historic (and ahistorical) charting of how one might petition the gods in one’s wanting, despair and repair. It describes a period of some years against the backdrop of a toxic queer relationship, framed in terms of the Roman Catholic tradition, the body, and other spiritual and occult practices.

Love is a wet slit hunted for food.

What g*d hath joined man must not divide. (Mark 10:9)

Sometimes one has to say no to the smegma-filled folds even if one has previously said maybe.

To skin a rabbit one must leave raw cuffs of fur ringing limp around its bony ankles. The pelt peels smoothly off in puppet-boned bodilessness. A pickle bath of 1.5-2 pH will halt decomposition indefinitely.

Desire comes to eat you whole.

In the event of jealousy or perceived disservice, injustice or grievance, invite her to hang you on a rusting nail as an example.

In uncertainty, let her begrudge you your labels.

In endlessness, you are an undiminishable well. You walk away undepleted from the sex act as all Women do, unenervated by such petty inconveniences as a loss of qi, ejaculation or refractory periods. The Spirit of the Valley is inexhaustible […] Draw on it as you will, for it will never run dry. (The Daodejing, Laozi)

You are a desecrated border.

To let her say she wanted merely friendship and to crawl into your skin is a lesson           in habit.

To love a body as violent as your own, to be opened like a salted fish, to be useless until you breathe in the same space as your obsession, is a gift and a mercy.

Say to your friend in the back of the taxicab that you guide others to happiness strictly as their province, not yours—
that you peer upon happiness as if glimpsing a scene through a filthy glass, dim and murkily, in a room to which you have received no invitation and brook no welcome, with a party of strangers who, laughing and drinking with each other, completely miss your filtered gaze at the window.

Have a little patience                 on the vascular back of your hand          like salt grains that never                overstay their tequila welcome.

Have your words rise and die between uvula and jugular in order to say one day.

Aspire to come clean with yourself. No longer curse the fig tree but turn over each dead leaf in your hands. Make promises like lotus root broth. Rip each stolen day off the tearaway lunisolar almanac, translucent in emerald print, becoming makeshift wrappers for bodies that seep through: limp fresh-caught fish                                           & other carcasses.

For further justifications for eating out, see: John 6:57

I am 26 when I first develop the instinct of lying to my then-girlfriend. I had a resolve never to misrepresent things to her and it has cracked wide open. I clung to the belief that a relationship is what you make it and this time I can get it right. That night she tells me I should walk away if this is really that important to me. While I’m marshalling my belongings she breaks down and blubbers wondering how I can just walk away. I think I am forgiving the contradiction for the moment, and end up enabling circular logic for the next three years. I concede to her pressure to go no-contact with my new friend. I do not. She asserts that every masculine person who makes me laugh has designs on me. I find her conclusions troubling. It strikes me as unjust, almost like an Oscar Wilde misquote—depriving me of solitude, yet not affording me company. She says I never talk to her the way I talk to them. I do not try to exchange words. She is right. I do not try. She does not like words, and says she is dyslexic, besides.

Some years have passed since I was able to say thing after thing to someone and feel like they understood each subtly swerving half-joke. Some good few years, good being subjective, starved of language, fed instead precepts of pantang such as don’t sleep during Maghrib and Maghrib must close windows, such as eating bamboo shoots will cause an argument between us as two eldest children, such as reasoning so fallacious it makes me go to therapy. For the first time I decide no-contact trespasses against a single tenuous boundary I am failing to sustain, but I don’t say it. For three and a half years I am convinced she knows when I am lying, that entities live inside her, accruing half-occluded knowledge. At East Coast Park celebrating someone’s birthday I am surprised, delighted and then awash in fear when we bump into my new friend—my no-contact friend—the birthday boy says, how serendipitous that we’re in the same place at the same time, let’s hang out. Ten minutes later the insistent calls begin. I look at my phone. I don’t answer. I continue not answering until she calls another of my friends. I say, with trepidation, they’d better pick up. I tell my forbidden friend, I think you’d better go. I am regaled with interrogation. Who is there. I dreamt—someone slapped me awake and told me. She’s there. She just posted an Instagram story. In the same place.

My friends exchange looks and tell me this is really too much. They lie for me and it is the beginning of the end. For the first time I am learning the limits of her unnerving knowledge, an antenna tuned to another channel she has no right listening to, catching a stray frequency, always in some half-remembered dream. I smuggle my new no-contact forbidden friend into becoming my new colleague in a workplace where they were also looking for someone who likes words. I show up without warning and am shown into her peeling beige bedroom, stinking of depression, windows sealed in an un-air-conditioned room under imminent threat of a wasp aspiring to nest outside the 6th floor of which she lives in fear. I devote hours to my concealed communications and think the yearning divine. The cloistering lends a layer of mysticism to my affairs. I still manage to be shocked when my new no-contact forbidden now-colleague friend says she is in love with me. I believe I might be, as well. A few months later I stop believing anything at all. By then the lying has become a practised craft. By then neither words nor my word are sacred. I send and delete so many texts. The most important ones are now muted and archived from sight. I forget more names than I care to keep. I am cheating in virtual space. A slew of placeholders that I look to, to fill my roster, to distract me from my need for deceit.

Nesting: Between the ages of 25 and 29 the three consecutive rental spaces I live in border on illegal. They are all nestled in the Marine Parade area, because my then-girlfriend is ‘used to it’ (having lived there in a private apartment with an ex-girlfriend for two years). The first is called King’s Mansion and is the shittiest S$3.5mil condominium I’ve ever seen in my life. The landlady has erected partitions to create several rooms with false walls that feel too hollow and flimsy to lean on. Ours has One (1) sliding window. We count perhaps eight or nine tenants sharing a single bathroom, including a large teenager who is always locking himself in it in the mornings for an unconscionable duration. Cockroaches encroach upon the nesting territory of the kitchen sink and I get a yeast infection that flares up into discharge like pink meat after I use the bathroom bidet. The landlady is belligerent when we point out that the air-conditioning she promised has not arrived. She is always saying she opens her house out of the goodness of her heart. She gets a cut over her forehead and says it is because she was training to climb Mount Everest. During the last few weeks of our stay, she has suddenly acquired two huge dogs who bark excessively when tenants try to enter and have diarrhoea all over her living room. She texts the tenant group chat and frantically demands if anyone has fed the dogs. No one feeds the dogs. She is dog-sitting but it seems as if she is dog-shitting.

Reconstituted meat from ‘THE FUNGAL PIECE OF SHIT TELLS ME THE NAME OF GOD’, ‘EIGHT MINUTES IN THE TEMPLE IS ALL SHE NEEDS’, first published here in Singapore Unbound’s SUSPECT Journal.

Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean writer-artist.  Her first child, GAZE BACK (Lambda loser, Singapore Literature Prize 2020), is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. Her work trades in the abject, vulgar and pleasurable, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Find her in her natural habitat: @marylyn.orificial (IG) & @grinchfucker (twt/X)

We are delighted to host four writers in virtual residence, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore. Joyce Chua, Marylyn Tan, Lisabelle Tay and Jerrold Yam will be in virtual residence from June to December 2024.