grapefruit tetris

notice the temptation to scratch
beneath the pith, four rows of
bitter fingers
prying open a rocket silo,
tongue demolishing pit, surreptitious
sawdust sauntering across alluvial soil
while 8-bit nutcrackers shatter the sound
barrier,
wounds rimmed in salt and
licked like tequila shots
pour it up, pour it up, those flaming
lambos, these flaming lips, everything
everywhere all in flames,
a T-junction dosed in citrus
just rubbing, rubbing,
robbing: portents and
dollar signs of distant stardust
settling on endocarp,
trauma embedded in its seeds.

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microdosing pineapple

light?
flecked are the fulcrums
i kneel on, forming a single whine
of unending aches, sharp hiss
at pinpricks below my belly——
i lean heavy into the same post,
survey the scene:
white sheets bruised daubs
red brick and black clots
the stick in the bin camouflaged
the cheeky yellow rinds prickly among
scarlet scrapes of the bed.

at the lockless door, a new ring
reminding me i should have known
at eighteen i am grown enough

to? sweat out the terror,
scrub cloth against cloth,
miscarry alone at the back door
of the mind, bear down this
drifting drear
that something whole has to be
fruited from all effort
that midlings and seedthings
aren’t choice cuts enough–—

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Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria. They are a co-founder of Monzoom.xyz, an online platform for emergent art practices and alternative education, and co-organiser of Holiday Poets Society, a Vienna-based poetry collective. His practice revolves around material and sensorial fetishes of desire, poetics of hospitality, body memory, queer ecologies, and other tangential thoughts through a performative collocation of sculpture, video, movement, text, and olfactory objects. They have presented their work in Vienna, Sofia, Yogyakarta, Tallinn, New York, Brussels, and Auckland among other cities. Their poetry manuscript sun-dried air was a finalist of the 2022 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, and their poetry has recently been published in the anthology New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022).

Raksha (she/they) is a community worker, educator, grad student, and writer. She has worked with various communities on creating research together - including older persons, LGBTQ persons, transnational families, and sex workers on issues of health, housing, gender based-violence, and work. Her poetry work has been published in Exhale: An Anthology of Queer Voices (2021). She has also performed spoken word as part of Sekaliwags and Mass Hysteria. Raksha currently serves as Vice President of Project X Society Singapore.

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