2022 1st Place Winner - Leo Kang Beevers, 'As a Moment Glimpsed Only Through Migration'

LEO KANG BEEVERS

First Prize - 2022 Tower Poetry Competition, 'Dream'

As a Moment Glimpsed Only Through Migration

Not knowing how to order their lives if not

by burning, they moved from room

to room. If there was something more than that

taking hold, deep where the dreamer can’t touch,

I couldn’t say. Outside, as usual, little resistance

at the flesh. Having reaped the lightning, they bound it

steadily and with tenderness, endless, rain

frailing the afterthought. Then winter, already. Then dew

along the windows. A still-flowering maple branch,

which is to say an artform, of their survival. The wild geese

have escaped from their paintings—feel the wound. As if

painting is nothing more than the sound the sky makes

in hunger. Paletteless. As if even that was enough

to live in. The hands you fell into were the colour

of cut stems. Or the raw, unbitten blue

their wings turn to, before they heal.