Olivia Do
Social justice is not social capital, or
Christian Yeo Xuan
Deir Taanayel has many ducks. Some days the ducks walk
round the park. They don’t have to pay the small entrance
fee, they just live there. Fig trees look for the ducks. Exhale
loudly. They have a growing photo gallery, the ducks, a real
scream of fig trees. Most days the ducks amble. Most days
the ducks find small children, make faces at them. The
ducks witness suffering. Sometimes the ducks see their
friends, but they never really link up. It’s like what they say.
Justifying the life of a refugee is a waste of time. It’s
particularly galling when there is a religious component to
it. Once on a walk the ducks said, no one is asking you to have
clean hands, in fact they said get your hands dirty. Wings still
flapping, filthy.
Refuge
For Beqaa
Say the figs fell
already dead.
Say I saw you again
by the cedars
rippling like sand.
Say we loved each other
relentlessly.
In the world where
we are alive and well,
we are no longer dreaming
of olives.
It’s not that we need
reminding—
pain argues for peace
well enough.
Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer based in Singapore by way of Paris and Beirut. His chapbook, So Rain, won the 2025 Sundress Chapbook Competition. His work has been published or is forthcoming in EPOCH, ANMLY, The Madison Review, The Missouri Review, Indiana Review, Foglifter, Tupelo Quarterly, and Oxford Poetry, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, and has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, National Poetry Competition, and the Bridport Prize. A Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, he has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Tin House, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, and the National Arts Council of Singapore.
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