Month: August 2016

She didn’t know how much he had in the bank when he died; whether he had any savings, whether he had debts that needed to be paid. Decades after, when she finally arranged to sell the house, I am told there were huge back taxes taken out of the sale amount. The only memories I have involving actual glimpses of money: every morning before he left for work, he pushed a fistful of soft bills across the table— for the market, for groceries. Did anything extra have to be pleaded for? And so the sewing she did on the side makes sense. One morning she took me by the hand and said Don’t tell of our errand today. We took a jeepney to the market where her friend owned a dry goods store. Her friend handed her a paper sack and gave me a treat. I never asked about it, and she never told. I’m haunted by exchanges: what was borrowed, what was returned. What was bought, or sold. Before my eighteenth birthday, she gave me a ring with tiny sapphires, my birth stone. She believed in the power and endurance of gold. Last year, before I left, she plunged her hand into a dilapidated purse and took out a knotted handkerchief; in its folds, a pair of diamond earrings, a matching pendant on a chain. I have them in a box in my drawer. Sometimes I take them out and look at them, touch all their surfaces dented with bits of brilliance.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Scrip.

they do not loiter
here for long

they say they come
to watch the fish and learn

the ways of water
what it takes to stand

as long as the egret does
doubling the image

on the stilled surface
before it remembers

the length
of its wingspan

but don’t speak
of greatness yet

what is the end
or the beginning

from the middle
which looks both ways

 

In response to Via Negativa: Above the river.

Though I too live in a blur of worlds, I am one
shade of brown: my blood not as obviously mixed.

Who gave me this nose? I have no dimples. I have a brow
broad as a page. The eyes tell when I am smiling.

And eyebrows constitute a language of their own. Never
asleep, they are two republics separated by a bridge.

Do you know the power of discarded fishbones?
I know delight can interchange with dilate.

I’ve strung the dried stumps of my daughters’ birth
cords on a safety pin; this is one way I keep them close.

Do you know the sound the tin bucket makes, the shape
of its mouth as it looks at the sky from inside the well?

In the bird house made from hollowed-out wood: wasps
coming and going. They are not angry yet, only nesting.

The ginger flower’s torch burns with scent in the middle
of the garden. Not even the rain can put it out.

Newspaper stories of lifeless bodies fished out of
the gutter: too many now every day to number.

Their wrists are bound, their mouths sealed
with tape. Before they died, who had their number?

Along the canals, a rash of deep green vines:
their arms bear yellow flowers, too many to number.

At the height of summer, the flowers give way
to fruit. The bloated fall— some number.

The rest are allowed to live awhile, then are reaped to assuage
hunger. The problem is with hunger that knows no number.

The bigger the maw, the bigger the hunger. It won’t stop:
what can’t be satisfied has no belief in limits, in numbers.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Issue.