Antecedent*

So, in the looking back, there I shall find the answers hooking hands, playing with the familiarity of lying together.

Which? To each?

Perhaps I’ve been foolish but I take nothing back.

(first published in foam:e)

Diver*

I have been keeping my silence tucked inside the mustn’t-haves.  You are still. I tease out the emerging prohibitions of confidence. I suppose giving out the danger signs is in itself a signal to be enclosed, to invite enclosure like a cut across water.  The water giving in. You smoothing the already clear.

Reason*

So what could be possible in this statue conversation, the way when the hand flies out of your heart, the beast keeps running after us, slight in anxious pursuit.  The heart is still finding a way to open in this writhing.

Stranger, what is without?

*excerpts from my journal written in January 2005 while recovering from an episode of mental illness

All poems from Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, New
Zealand, 2007)

Jill Chan was born in Manila, Philippines in 1973.  She has a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, migrated to New Zealand in 1994.  Her work has been published in MiPOesias, foam:e, Poetry New Zealand, Trout, JAAM, Southern Ocean Review, Takahe, Brief, Bravado, Spin/Kokako, Poetry Aotearoa, Magazine, and many others; and forthcoming in Tears in the Fence, Blackmail Press and Blue Fifth Review. She has two books of poetry: The Smell of Oranges (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, New Zealand, 2003), and Becoming Someone Who Isn’t (http://www.earlofseacliff.co.nz/Becoming.htm) (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2007). She is one of the poets featured in the New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive. She is the editor of Poetry Sz: demystifying mental illness.