Goth Poems

When they were married, billionaire tycoon Mr. Seven said, "That goth bitch is just after my money and my looks. If she dares to ever touch me, I'll chop her up into pieces."After the divorce, Mr. Seven went around telling others, "My wife has been bullied by her family all her life. She is the most gorgeous woman on earth. If you look at her funny, I'll gouge your eyes out!"Mr. Seven, do you even hear what you're saying?

"He is Keegan. Don't ever get in trouble with him. He's from The Dragomirs. And you know who they are," said Louisa Collins to Lyla Helliwell on the first day Lyla entered Gothic Academy. Sure, Lyla knew who they were. Very influential Vampire family. Wealthy and powerful. But, Keegan Dragomir had marked Lyla as a new object of bullying. "We hate witches. They don't deserve to be in the Freaky world. They are just human who pretend to have power like us, with their stupid potions," said Keegan. Gothic Academy was a special school for The Freakies---weird and magical kids. Vampire, Witch, Siren, Lycan, Goblin, Elf, to Centaur. Something huge and dangerous was happening there, made the two different kind of Freakies---Lyla and Keegan---who hated each other, have to work together to protect the school from danger. Meanwhile, the unfinished story of their parents long long ago, revealed.

Tunnels deconstructs the individual’s Romantic fascination with ‘love’ or the grammaticality of beauty. Ideally, the ‘tunnels’ in the collection are subterranean love poems from the suburban imaginary. These seemingly syntactic tunnels travel through one’s literary imagination or heterotopic dreamscapes, and while αγάπη (Greek for ‘love’) inspires these rhizomic tunnels to navigate the abysmal ‘meta-spectacle’ of gesture, language or moment of poemness, the mind like the many-colored jeepneys of Manila, where driving past roast goose restaurants in Shek Kip Mei or spotting stilt houses in Kampong Kleang, attempt to explore the transgeneric textualities of the everyday, alongside the unstructurality of time and space, the littoral and the liminal.

While cleaning Desmond Maynard's house, I accidentally knocked over his mother's keepsake. He once told me it was his most precious possession. But when I picked it up, hundreds of love letters spilled out. There were beautiful poems, passionate lyrics, and heartfelt confessions. He had written one letter a week without stopping. On the back of each one wrote a line: To My Love, Bunny. The nickname rang a bell. It was his junior in college. Things started to make sense. I slaved away for 13 years, running his household and caring for his family, but Desmond never even said he liked me. That was because he already had someone he liked. I sorted the letters by date, put them back, and grabbed my phone to make a call. "Mom, I'm in for the marriage proposal."