From Liang Yue Xian: The Price of a Marriage

From Liang Yue Xian: The Price of a Marriage

From Liang Yue Xian: The Price of a Marriage

“A softness of the head!”
she must have thought on the nights
when he didn’t come back
and she weighed the price of her marriage
against the distant rumble and crack
of mahjong tiles.

A Hakka lout for a husband
when she could have had
good Cantonese money
for silken sheets to keep her company
on nights like this.

He had spoken of love, she had laughed
at the boy with the curry-puff hairstyle,
lined him up like a card in her pack
and shuffled. Who will it be
for the prettiest girl in Kuching?
The young intellectual? The son of the rubber tycoon?

Three long years, he had spoken
beneath the clatter of coins poured out on the table,
a low sweet murmur, promising nothing more
than starlight touching the first dew of morning,
the flight of a swallow in rain,
the violet shudder of air
struck by lightning.

He still spoke of love
on the nights he came in to stay,
to press the hard lines of her body
into frightening softness.