Baguio in summertime, in the '60s. The lake has a central fountain that shoots a jet of water into the air. It falls back down and does it over again, until the motor is shut off at night. The water isn't crowded with rowboats yet. In front of the gazebo in the middle of the skating rink, someone took a photograph of my mother, bending down to give the little red tricycle I'm pedaling a push from behind. We are not dressed for this kind of outing: she's in stilletos, a sheath skirt and cropped blazer in checked beige. I'm wearing a dress with puffed sleeves, squinting in the light, a bow in my hair. I like to remember her this way, especially now that she spends most of her days sleeping under pink flannel blankets, when not being fed soft soups and fruit by the day or night nurse.
Vigil
In the old days, the dead were not immediately escorted to a final resting place in the earth, nor lifted onto a funeral pyre. Their hair was oiled and dipped in the fragrance of orange groves, their faces turned toward the high-shelved mountains where they would perch in rows like figured birds— No longer on the ground terraced by the farmer's plow but not yet in the canopy of the gods, wreathed with smoke they presided at the house-front wrapped in blankets. Coming and going, you'd feel it was you they held vigil for; you they couldn't yet bear to leave.
What We Want
My friend, who's recently become a parent, is venting again about the ways working moms are so unnoticed and undercompensated, if at all. Her LinkedIn profile has descriptors like results-oriented and self-starter; public policy analyst, program director. She owns and can actually pull off wearing a fancy gold-colored jumpsuit; she leads a nonprofit organization and hops on planes to attend conferences out of state— but I know too well that kind of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion though we might have gentle, supportive partners, and a freezer drawer packed with microwavable meatballs or emergency dumplings. After I delivered (such an easy-sounding word, like something one does with takeout pizza or wings plus extra fries) my last child, groggy and sleep-deprived, I went back to work after only ten days, since I had no maternity leave benefits. Lecturing on critical analysis and Woman Warrior before a roomful of mostly bored students, I'd feel my milk- engorged breasts leak underneath my blazer and flush from embarrassment—but mostly from the fear I'd be reduced to just a body that did whatever things a body did before pushing another body into the world. I do but also don't want to tell my friend that it all gets easier somewhere down the line—untruth that rolls off each page of books with titles like On Becoming a Woman or The Housewife's Guide to Becoming Wealthy, their slick covers depicting their impeccable houses and impossibly narrow, postpartum waists. But I do want to say, this has not and never has been a country of easy, whichever way we look at it. There are parts of me that want to answer an ad for caretaker of a remote island between the West Coast of Scotland and the Isle of Skye, and parts that want to stay writing in a coffee shop, until the baristas kick me out. Parts of me want to scream and scold or throw pots at a tiled wall; and parts of me will sob, wring their hands and want to die but not do it after all though life, as we know, is so hard and people so heartless; but tomorrow is Wednesday and there's a farmer's market where one can get the crunchiest peas and fresh strawberries. I want to make something good from that, and just watch the people I love eat it, the way my mother would stand at the kitchen door watching me clean my plate after school, eyes puffy after a good cry of her own.
Bona Fides
Was the pea underneath two dozen cushions really a pea, or a hard, painful lump on the girl's backside? If you were merely a guest dropping by uninvited or un- announced, you wouldn't expect to be offered percale sheets and a pancake breakfast. My Lola always boiled the breakfast eggs along with coffee in the percolator— when espresso machines could just as well be spaceships. But no one ever examined my hands, turning them over to check the thinness of skin; or made me lay my fingers on the table, my nails like new potatoes pushing headstrong through soil.
Burgeoning
Not even the beginning of summer, and knobs of fruit in the tree begin to purple and glow through wrappers of green; but the young persimmon, all by itself near the fence, unless self-fruitful, will need another cultivar to flower. Soon, the river's rim a block away is edged with sails. I marvel at how taut and sleek bodies look against the sand, like offerings to the sun— Once, I too buffed my shoulders and thighs, impatient for the world to take me whole and claim me for a future not yet lined with failure or regret. I held in my hands the fragrance and roundness of a thing not yet cloven or hatched. Long afterwards, I confess it still has my heart.
Return to Sender
What is a missive that doesn't look like a mission, a letter that might offer itself as peace or at the very least, a truce? Throughout the year, I've tried the equivalent of conversation starters; furry animal memes, brief glimpses of the sky and treeline shot through my window on the passenger side. At night, the canopy above is perforated with light that science tells us is actually the absence of light. But still we crane our necks, remembering myths that gave us queens and mothers, beasts and monsters; oracles whose visions of the burning future are like letters always returned to the sender.
Mnemonic
No matter how difficult her days have become, she hasn't said light hurts her eyes or her missing teeth can't taste the sugar. Someone brings roses in a vase, fruit in a bowl— each wearing a veined membrane just before wilting. Outside, early summer prints copies of itself on every leaf. If one day I forget my first language, put one in my mouth.
Mother-
Cannot fall asleep from having Mother- worry for so many things I never can put adequately into words. I have Mother-ache and Mother-sorry, Mother-lonely, Mother-poor and -poorly, Mother-never-will-come- up-to-measure. Mother-who-has-left, -has-left-behind, -has-herself-been-left, who cannot finger the space in the middle without feeling the old pulsing that once came through her, bound her, unbound her... Picture Mother as a mime whose arms close around her, rock her, remind her: who will save you if not yourself?
My People
You look for the ones you can say my people, my people with— or they look for you and you could find each other even in the unlikeliest places: a tap on the shoulder while the glittery gala crowd does the electric slide for the thousandth time; at the Greyhound station or airport transfer terminal. You don't have to answer Are you from here-here or there- there or if you bought tickets to watch that guy whose sold out shows rehash our fathers' and uncles' backyard jokes, and you get why halo-halo with rice krispies is OK but someone has to draw the line at gummy candy or pop rocks. And OK sure, P in place of F or vice versa— but with the ones you can say my people, my people with, there is no need to explain the tingle of calamansi in the air, distinct from orange or navel or tangerine. My people, my people, perhaps we can roll with the times and dip them in sweet-sour sauce but we can't wear pineapple shirts and butterfly sleeves for halloween or do the haka in a woven g-string. And yes, even a certain dictator's son has blood on his hands. Know what I mean? Even if we are, we don't always have to be engineers or doctors or nurses, the kind that irate patients demand should be replaced by "real" ones. Hail the nannies and maids that mop the floor so hard- working, always so hard-working, the caregiver who used to be an OFW in the Middle East assigned to octogenarians at a home; the girl who walked around a foreign city with her camera, documenting how our women met in public parks to share food and news of safehouses and better jobs. Hail the trending ube lattes, the omnipresent roasted pig, bags of daing and barako that make their way, hand to traveling hand: their smoky, salty notes, indelible signatures in the air.
A Commonwealth
The common weal, meaning the body politic, the well-being of an entity or state. The state capital, a Sunday in spring: streets where, even late in this century, I don't see too many with my same face. Perhaps transients and students are gone on break. Perhaps, dark-skinned ones like me are careful to avoid spaces where rebel flags with seven stars still whip high in the wind, shameless declaration and misplaced belief that all men are not created equal. But surely you've walked past the homeless on the avenue, stopped to listen to buskers at the train station take a sad song and make it better, through chipped teeth and smiles.