Advice to Herself at Age Eighteen

She began with a Chinese word: fai, which means
quick, swift, rapid, or to hurry up. She was
maturing and she needed no helmet from refined
lust. Quick, she must learn to prescribe
the bluntness of love, and lengthening
loneliness of long Summer afternoons entitled
to come. Swift to issue the notice of attention,
with density, to this girl and that boy. The body
should be dazzled, pebbled, jumbled, by that bitch
or that bastard. Rapidly,

she ought to fuse confusion with desire,
discovery, alliterative sighs. Hurry up!
This moment with this girl or that boy
inherited everything, including interlaced
kisses, illuminated cunts.

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Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March 2006), and a co-founder & a co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Read more at SighMing.