Dedicated to my dad, who died in 2017, it features four tracks that piece together moments, scenes and sensations of grief and loss.
i wrote my poems in fragments—on my Notes app, receipts, scraps of paper, work documents, text messages, emails to myself. i recorded my poems by speaking into a microphone through a stocking stretched over a hanger, or on my geriatric iPhone. vocal processing changed my voice into new impressions and textures. found sounds reference both the precious and banal, such as pearl extraction, orchestra tuning, cicadas, a clicking mouse and shimmering.
in sending my recordings away to my friends for them to return as something new, i felt a sense of release.
– Panda Wong
Title of track: eternal phone lock screen image
Musical composition by Jamie Marina Lau.
eternal phone lock screen image
dad with head on hand on leg on chair
blue jeans and half smile
his precious fragile redundant body…
did you know pearls are the only precious gem
made by a living creature?
I’m recently obsessed w/ this TikTok channel pearl6680
montages of pearl extraction set to Lil Nas X’s Call Me by Your Name
an oyster spits a pearl out into the palm of pearl6680’s hand
reminds me of viral pimple popping videos
the way that pain can become a thing so totally foreign
like thinking you see the one that got away in the distance
and upon closer inspection
realising that instead
they are just a sculpture made
from mincemeat with wet
raisins for eyes…
unlock phone to see dad with
head on hand on leg on chair
something wild about how we proliferate
the technology’s blasé void with the
endless dandruff of our memories
something tender about how young he looks
in this photo where I wasn’t born yet
the way the future is pouring out of his face…
I’m reading about how pearls are a defence mechanism
layers upon layers of a crystalline
secretion called nacre build up
encasing any threat to the mollusc
like how Julietta Singh wrote
extreme physical pain swallows its object
this isn’t some trite analogy about how pain can become beauty
or a sad Disney metaphor for its lifechanging qualities
or the tired rag narrative of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
it’s about how it is consumed…
it’s about how it is digested…
it’s about how it is accumulated…
dad with head on hand on leg on chair
his life a pearl I hold between my teeth
I keep feeling and feeling with my tongue
for that elusive fuzz
Artwork by Amy Yu
