i.

Singapore, early monsoon season.

Your uncle comes home from the market

with three durians in a plastic net, helpless

and threatening as string-bound mudcrabs.

He sets them out on a chopping block

and splits them with a meat cleaver.

Their insides are a putrid-sweet secret

glistening under a surgeon’s lamp.

You think of the Old Testament stories

read to you in class, of a slain brother’s black blood

crying out from the soil, of a lust that writhes

and agitates inside God-anointed men

like a ball of serpents. The stain of a strained fruit

plucked by your ancestors, their criminals’ fingers

crusted with the promise of divine candy

turned to rot. So you understand yourself

infected with the same disease. You are a blind leper

languishing on a dirt road, a bad son

crushed underfoot by your creator

and all your Singapore summers imitate these scriptures:

you gorge yourself on durian until your breath

turns fecund and foul, and after, you drink saltwater

to rid yourself of the smell. A weird sacrament

for a Buddhist child to observe, but you observe it

faithfully; sip the saline from the durian husk—

the cup of thorns overflowing

not with blood, but with salt.
ii.

Blacktown is home, is the bone-dry heat baking

all the Western Sydney basin when Dharug summer

radiates from black asphalt like ancestors’ ghosts.

Your house is too small for all this yelling,

your parents’ curses burning holes in the carpet,

their no cow sense and I hope you die with your eyes open

shocking the windows like a violence of thundercracks

from within. All the while the double brick facade

expressionless as a hockey mask. Every weekend

you watch your father shear back the lawn

and think about the buzzcut heads of Singaporean boys

sent to weapons training at eighteen, an age you cannot fathom

ever reaching. The years, months, days

are intolerable already. How often have you wished

you had never been born? In your mother’s house

it’s always the same storm, just different thunderings,

each fork-tongued bolt of lightning striking

once, twice, three times at the familiar grievances

like salt rubbed into old wounds, or tilled into new soil.

And there you are: growing out of it, cowed and quiet,

withering on the branch like diseased fruit.

To be known here is to be naked, and to stay intact

one has to cultivate a hardened shell, a thorny demeanour

and a way to cover up that rancid stink

even if you believe that you could never be clean.
iii.

You grow up, grow out of your parents’ dreams,

exhaust yourself trying to explain

exactly what is a durian to the uninitiated.

(It’s easier just to show them your spikes.)

You live half a life barbed and difficult, another half

scrounging for a knife strong enough

to split yourself open, and do this all long enough

to know that if you wrestle with a durian

you will only hurt yourself. Better to leave it

until it ripens to its own breaking point;

better still to accept that bruised fruit

never falls far from the tree. You learn to accept

this like a bronze medal, equal parts sweet and sour.

Therapise yourself as you might, you will never not

have lived those years in the desert, sand-burnt,

half-mad, grovelling after manna from heaven

and the pillar of smoke twisting always

just an arm’s length out of reach. God doesn’t care

for your atheism; forgiven, forgotten or denied,

your childhood is as binding as sacred scripture.

All its rooms are inhabited by the smell of durian,

the memory you carry. You can only hope

that someday you may partake of the familiar fruit

and hold before the saltwater

not only to ask yourself if the cleanse is required,

but to question whether you have ever been unclean.