Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet. She was born in Singapore where she studied and taught before moving to Australia in 2007. She is currently completing a Master of Letters at Sydney University with a focus on poetry. Her writing has been published in literary journals such as Meanjin, HEAT Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Softblow, Hecate and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, with a poem forthcoming in Overland. Her work has also been selected for Black Inc’s Best Australian Poems 2010, to be published in November 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the Poets Union Youth Fellowship for 2010–2011. A chapbook of her poems will be published in mid-2011 with the assistance of Australian Poetry Ltd.

When In Rome

You went to Rome on your own

all those years ago. Your maps sat

on the shelf in your mother’s house,

creased, yellowing. We lay

on your old bed that afternoon
and you traced a flight path

down my arm. It’s not somewhere

you want to be alone, you said.

We took a room on the top floor

of the hotel. There was a balcony

that overlooked the cobblestoned lane

that rang like an ironsmith’s

each time a woman strode past

the shops towards the piazza. We

stopped for coffee but did not sit.

You clutched a map but didn’t need it.

I was here, you gestured

at the fountain, it’s for lovers. I looked

to see its beauty but saw only

tourists fingering cameras, myself

included. I let my hands drop

into the flow and laughed

at how cold it was. You kissed me

on the side of my salty neck.

In the darkness of the providore

we stood and breathed in

the brine of the meats, the ripeness

of olives. We learnt the true names

of prosciutto. We drank warm

oil. The man behind the counter

asked where we were from. Paradise.

You should visit one day. He shook his head.

At the markets we bought

red-stained cherries. I carried

them in one hand and your

years in the other. Each step

we took overlaid each step

you’d taken. In our room, I washed

the fruit in the bathtub. They floated

like breasts, free and heavy.

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