Dining Alone

By | 8 June 2020
The sky watches like yesterday.

The stars haven’t finished predicting. 


The door doesn’t drag on—

A fly, sprawled, pushes to enter. 


The candles bruise their souls,

the wind, outside, refrains


from stepping in once more.

Dinner comes, doesn’t know where


to begin. The windows can’t eat.

Their faces, thirsting for a glass 


of water, nearly break

into a pitch.  I raise my hand


to the glass,

picking up gravity.
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Belle Ling received her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her first poetry collection, A Seed and a Plant, was shortlisted for the HKU International Poetry Prize 2010. Her recent poetry manuscript, Rabbit-Light, was awarded Highly Commended in the 2018 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Another manuscript, Grass Flower Head, was shortlisted for the First Book Poetry Prize of Puncher and Wattmann in 2018. In 2018, her poem '63 Temple Street, Mong Kok' was a co-winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize held by the Australian Book Review.

More by Belle Ling on Cordite Poetry Review →

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