sea-chorus
after Danez Smith
I swallow men whole
sweep entire streets into my mouth
pick at the gaps in my teeth with your
buckled houses I need no church bell
I arrive before your God awakes
sound like wooden spoons walloping
a child’s cheek tree splintering in the wind
pus-wound splitting open my silt hips shake thick
like swamp mud fracture each makeshift altar
with a lover’s brined bones pick the metal locks
of your precious gate like unhinging a finger
I must see all I swallow so I pluck your chattering
roof open there you are come now,
walk out to my wall of water & drink yourself home
[ ]
I walk out to a wall of water the silver of waves
hungry to swallow us like pigs
nanay sings you cannot swim from the wind
galvanized iron will not stop an ocean’s cha-cha
midturn but you can leave this world in your own
home so I join her our rocking chairs swinging
with the mango trees outside I hear the slow throat
of street cats drowning the water, a night blue
-head of hair all of our town, caught in her knots
o rosary of broken teeth altar of plants dying
o how the water flies across our houses
the wind crumpling us to the next barangay
our taped roofs gone again
our bodies severed in half
[ ]
I sever my body in half
my ribs a galaxy of lifeboats
send guyabano leaves down the river
tilt an infant’s nostrils to the sky
pluck gills into the boy who sells gabi
on the corner & now he breathes
beneath water too the boy finds
his favorite ball wedged beneath a ship
now dragged onto our sidewalk its air still full
the orange sun calms his mother down
from the coconut tree imagine your missing
are somewhere resting on the gentle lap
of a wet car’s bones a barnacled home
a nameless ghost
[ ]
what good is a nameless ghost?
today I walked out of my house alive
& saw mountains for the first time
since I was a child where are the trees?
where are the houses?
sometimes the wind is a fist or
ten toes clawing into a back or
the last grip before a garbled farewell
do you remember what ocean smells like
after a storm? malangsak! when the sea wades
on our street still I can’t get the taste
of fish guts & slow mud out my nose
my hands shake the table
or is this another wave coming?
[ ]
is this another wave coming? the walls shake
& we almost think it’s an earthquake
but then see the men running
their feet pounding slipperless & panting
bamboo poles bouncing atop their shoulders
your aunti screams they’re carrying bodies
we make the sign of the cross to simple tarpaulin
until there are too many legs
dangling like a snapped chicken’s neck
the cemetery is still flooded
so we dump our dead in the plaza
a field of children piled into black-mud holes
almost like craters of a second moon
almost like we were planting them
[ ]
what if we were planted, instead?
what if the mass grave was just a garden
you weren’t afraid to visit our twisted limbs
a shallow root system emerging through soil
pick santol from atop our heads come now
& count our toes marking each year you survived the storm
what if the children swept to sea all learned to swim?
what if they met an elder in the middle of the ocean
smoking a pipe made of sugar cane her wrinkled arms
a raft to rest on she whispers tell me your stories
& they speak of waves that touched the sky
before swallowing their families hush, na.
they float & the elder blesses them in warm rain
a ghost visiting their sleep
[ ]
sometimes I think ghosts visit my sleep
each time it rains the house smells of rot again
I wake & find my hair salt-wet soaking
my clothes smell of mothballs for weeks
what good is a death anniversary shared
by your entire family? who will light the candle
when no one is left undrowned? I weep
for my mother & press my ear to water
instead of an international phone call
there are too many babies beneath this soil
without even a shoebox to hold them
I stare at my hands & see the white eye
of a storm forming I keep dreaming
I drowned my family
[ ]
write me a poem where your family never drowned
there are no bodies severed in half
your ribs are just your ribs
write me a poem with no ocean
a poem where you name the ghost
there is no wave coming, remember
there is no ocean the children swim
then walk themselves back ashore alive
remember, there is no ocean
this time, plant a tree on unbothered soil
this time, there are no bodies to undead
only a slow-dance waiting
your mama in the kitchen
asking you to take her back to the sea.
the dresses we lost to storm surge
Tanuan, Leyte, Philippines
November 8, 2013
if the winds snatch our closets again
don me in the singing of zinc roofs
the night howl of stray cats in rain
after typhoon nothing is left unwet
even the church’s cracking roof
coconuts snap open with salt
cloak me in the remains of my mama’s
dissertation a drowned laptop years of research
swallowed by the flood of her bedroom
make me an altar of the photos
we salvaged from sea its water lines a crown
above my lolo’s wiggling ears
once – we identified our dead’s bloated bodies
only by the tattered clothing they drowned in
o skirt of forgotten match sticks
garland of damp bedding –
cloak our arms in moth wings
send down the gowns
worthy of burial
for the unnamed
dendrochronology of my queer
after Shira Erlichman
I pick the salt from my armpit hairs & hear
lemongrass rooting to my knees in the garden
the first track bites my neck dark in a dorm room
while her roommate pretends to sleep
I inherit the hand-me-down clothes of big cousins’ girlfriends
& smell their old tee shirts when no one is watching
my first track – a self-inflicted hickey
to hairy arms as I practice in the motel hot tub
I am 19 at the back of a sex shop purchasing my first strap
learning to hold the plastic leather cracking at my hips
what if the sky is trans too?
what if each body of water that has found me
is an ancestor who loved the way I do?
my first gay kiss – a strawberry chapstick
shared with an entire t-ball dugout
I open my mouth & flying cockroaches
swallow me with the kitchen ceiling
