Allison Thung
Allison Thung is a Singaporean poet and project manager. She is the author of Reacquaint (kith books, 2024) and Things I can only say in poems about/to an unspecified 'you' (Hem Press, 2025). Her poetry has been published in ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Allison is an Assistant Poetry Editor for ANMLY. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @poetrybyallison, or at www.allisonthung.com.
Easy read of the poems in the images above:
$140
Deny me material help and characterise it saving me from myself. Cite existing conditions as reason enough to send me home from the emergency room with nothing to show for my trip but over-the-counter painkillers. Turn this one-off incident to sometimes it happens to happens all the time, so that norm becomes to seek not cure but to (over)compensate. To accommodate one injured limb by shifting the weight of the world onto the other three, so that pain relief is but relocation. Or hold an articulation at some angle unnatural that it strains all others adjacent, but still typical enough that the stress is neglectable. In summary, to lay the groundwork needed for me to always position myself as though I am enduring my very initial moments as a tangible being, or as they say, stand like it’s my first day on earth. Which isn’t to say that I have no role at all in this to play—but it is to say, Thank you for the paracetamol; here’s my credit card.
Exit
the body
at every
opportunity
that arises,
such that
dreams, even
memories, are
experienced
in the third
person. Like
a picture of
you framed so
long ago you
recall the
moment from
photographer’s
perspective;
or a story told
repeatedly
until you are
main character
turned narrator.
Because distance
is avoidance
is safety; and
detachment is
unaltering the
instance is
immortalisation.
So, go ahead—
step back.
Step away.
And pretend it
is intentional,
not inevitable.
Hair as
another’s inconvenience to solve, so that bob becomes a dirty word, haircut a threat, and every longhaired girl my age the embodiment of envy.
Hair as object of scorn; length, parting, accessories all gateways to mockery couched as harmless little jokes.
Hair as first instance of femininity, left untied in attempt to retain salon’s costly efforts, but intentionally misunderstood as challenge to authority.
Hair as grounds for experimentation, which is to say bob is still a dirty word, but then what teenager doesn’t venture the occasional cuss?
Hair as symbol of semi-requited love, snipped and braided and mailed eleven thousand, two hundred, and forty kilometres northwest, alongside candy five dollars too pricey.
Hair as assertion of unique identity, from medium brown, to light brown, to red, to red, to red, to copper, to violet, to ash brown, to sometimes wishing it was red again.
Hair as source of frustration, bluntly cut in the bathroom with a pair of kitchen scissors, as the rest of the world fell away.
Hair as sacrifice to illness and cure, littering the ground like leaves of brown and red and copper, grief made inaudible first by gratitude for being alive at all, and then the low roar of vacuum running daily.
Hair as source of comfort, in all its glory once more, only signs of its rigours the just in case cloth caps still in the cupboard, and the always insistence on shoulder length and beyond.
