The morning they ignite your house / I collapse the way artists do on Channel 7 / I wake up two years later / on the kitchen floor / facedown in a pool of Sarsi / and shred your old prison letters using my teeth / I beg God to smite me / if no one lets me live here anyway / the hours stretch / into seawater / while the moon unravels / above us / like an ulcer / inside the cheek / the girl who kissed me / dizzy at the bus stop / said my lips reeked / of driftwood / and diesel / and machete / my bed is no longer safe / in my dreams / the dead return / while asleep / I’m still running / and running / my mother’s remains were buried in the closet / and your daughter rolls / the policeman’s dick / in her mouth / like it’s a revolver / back home / we compare love to a massacre / this rot lives / inside us all / I brought it with me accidentally / through cardboard boxes / and multivitamin containers / and smile-sized scratches inside my wrists / the receiver on the countertop sputters / like flame to the back / of a spoon / kayo ang biktima / puntahan niyo ang bahay / buhusan niyo ng gasolina / sigaan ninyo / cut to post-roll / toothpaste jingle / radiowaves disintegrating / into ‘72 all over again / the hissing / yet another pistol / swinging overhead / farmers falling / one by one / their innards feeding the reeds / is it true / the inmates of New Bilibid / resembled an overcrowded jaw / your cellmate’s face / so close / to yours / even the half-hearted hymns / drifting through the barred window / seemed farther away / I am pregnant with the loneliness / of a strange country / longing for a home / I will never belong to / last week at the supermarket / I was greeted by a man / in our native tongue / he said he’s been missing me / even if we’ve never met / in my apartment / I cried for days / I plucked thrice-bruised fruit from the basket / and broke it using my teeth / even then / shivering in the pool of my dining room floor / drenched in rotten juice / and month-old pulp / I was still convinced / there was something left to save

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The GMA Network, informally known as Channel 7, is a popular Filipino broadcast organization.

Sarsi is a Filipino brand of sarsaparilla.

“Kayo ang biktima. Puntahan niyo ang bahay, buhusan niyo ng gasolina, sigaan ninyo. [You’re the victims. Go to their houses, douse them in gasoline, and set them alight.]” are actual words spoken by then-chief of the Philippine National Police, Ronaldo “Bato” dela Rosa, urging former drug users to kill local drug lords.

The New Bilibid Prison is the largest penitentiary in the Philippines, infamous for overcrowding and gang wars.

Just say the word, and the bleach will drain itself from the icon of Jesus on the jeepney door. Blood rushing backwards, puncture wounds sealing shut, faces shrinking into rosebuds. Until all that’s left is Holiday Inn and the bastard child. Our bodies are temples of worship but we will chop off the hands of anyone who touches our sisters without consent. Love brought Lazarus back to life. This is how I met my beloved, in the morgue, martyred by four gunshots to the chest. He was twice my age and reeked distinctly of Tanduay Ice. Beside us, his best friend lay face-down with a silver knife in his back. What, this silly thing? He said. Don’t worry about it, hijo. You heard the man. Rehab pamphlet, PAGASA Signal 5, uncle dearest, brown boy suicide, who cares? At the table, we say grace for dinner, and I moan at the emptiness where my father used to sit.

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Jennelyn Olaires became the subject of a media frenzy in 2016 after being photographed cradling the body of her husband Michael Siaron, who was shot dead for being a “drug pusher.” Commentators compared the image to the sculpture Madonna della Pietà by Michelangelo.

According to the Book of John, Jesus Christ resurrected his friend Lazarus four days after his entombment.

Tanduay Ice is a type of alcoholic drink in the Philippines.

Hijo means “son” or “young boy” in Spanish.

The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) has a five-tier rating system for tropical cyclones, with wind signal five (“super typhoon”) being the strongest at 185 km/h or higher.

Oh, anak! My shining star! You know how much I love you. I’d do anything. You, with the leaves in your hair. My little poet. Don’t tell anyone. I’d kill myself if you leave. You’ll become a para-alcoholic. You’ll take on the characteristics of my disease, even if you never pick up the drink.¹ Please. You know how much I love you. You know

I still hear the frogs, the crickets, the birds and night critters.

It’s like

they make up

the air mattress I breathe in.²

Addiction is a family disease.¹

In America, I have no family.

Here, the Western imperialist identity integrated itself first (“my root is the strongest”) and thus conveyed itself as a value (“a person’s worth is determined by his root”). The conquered people are then forced to search for an identity that deteriorates in opposition to the Other. This is the crux of Rhizomatic theory, or “the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”³

Calla lilies are rhizomatous. Calla lilies were at my mother’s funeral. Calla lilies are wherever I go. Where else could I go? I became depressed. I became / worldless.⁴

It returns to me in frag        me n t s. Sweaty lips,

a whisper of Maybelline.        Floral skirt, bunched up at the thigh,

calla lilies

crushed

between hands. Callused hands.

Boot paint and tobacco. My mother’s tongue, unfurling into a filmstrip,

orbiting the whites of my eyes.

The neighbors and I sit in a sweaty circle, clotheslines whipping around us. The air reeks of garbage and ash. Amidst the squabbling of my grandfather’s roosters, one of them reaches over to caress my hair. Santo Niño, she calls me, her teeth broken like seashells. Amerikano, gorgeous curls. Except this doesn’t make sense because I’m not American and my country idolizes me more than it loves me and Jesus was never white in the first place and

From this imperialist origin flourishes an entire body of literature surrounding the concept of hybridity. Devised by Homi Bhabha, hybridity “means to locate interstices between different cultural subjectivities to study the effects of imperialism on identity, culture, and society.” The exchange between “you” and “I” (or the self and Other) creates an ambivalent “third space,” where hybridity thrives.⁵

When you breathe in,

you   capture the spirit

of things.

Did you know that?²

I’m breathing my people but it makes me dizzy. Jozé Rizal was mestizo, too. His parents adopted additional Spanish surnames under the decree of Governor-General Narciso Clavería, and he spent his life largely rejecting his own heritage.⁶ I could rename myself but you’d still remember me this way, sleeping whenever my legs gave out. Grassy field, blank space.⁴ There are

no borders here.

When my mother died, the world lost meaning. What was left to breathe? To be foreign is to be entombed. America is simply the afterlife. In my memory are lagoons. Wounded lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads, not calla lilies. People here couldn’t pin my country on a map. Do we exist if no one observes us? We are island scars of water. These islands, dynamited by alcohol.⁷ All this fire!

So much burning, I don’t know how to explain it.²

Rizal hid his final poem, “Mi último adiós,” inside an alcohol stove shortly before his execution.⁸

It’s been so long now, the images are b r oke n inside me.

At some point, I was there. I was

everything.

My mother’s vomit, the razor blade against my skin.²

Liquid sun of rums,⁷ pouring through the sky of my throat.

At some point,

I remembered.

I was the only person pulled out of line after arriving in New York. I spent four years inside the immigration office and woke up one day in a stranger’s bed. Aren’t you glad to have houses now? she asked, kissing the petal of my ear. Don’t worry about a thing, love, you are of superior intelligence! You will never relapse into ordinary native life.⁹

It goes without saying that the binary system encircling this third space has historically been preserved through violence. By comparison, while the rhizome is an “enmeshed root system,” the manner in which the network spreads lets no “predatory rootstock [take] over permanently.” This is in direct opposition to the totalitarian root of colonialism.³

No one can love me, not while I’m diseased. I want to settle down, but the law of settled life depends on its intolerant Root.³ I’m regurgitating all this in class when my professor bursts, It’s not enough, it’s not enough! The United States can’t beat down armed resistance. A huge army must be maintained to keep the natives down.⁹

That night, I call my sister in tears:

I’ve been searching for so long, but the only thing

I found was the dirty end of the world.⁷

How could mom do this to us?

I can’t breathe,

I can’t breathe.

Exile is still movement,

Even if it’s self-imposed.

It doesn't matter.

I’m forgetting mom.

I’m f org et t in g everything.

The roads, the trees, the house on the hill.

How she seized us, how she begged,

Please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please

Go back to sleep, kuya, my sister says. For me.

In the postcolonial system, the conquering person’s Root is consolidated as strongest, and of more value than the conquered. Through a “denaturing process,” the colonized person is quested after an identity that opposes the procedure of identification as initiated by the invader. “The sacred — but henceforth unspeakable — enigma of the root’s location” embodies a thrilling moment in the Poetics of Relation.³ The ambivalence of one’s root is holy in its subjectivity.

My third space is liminal. Stairwell into nothing, lotto booth with no vendor. Best Western off Newark. International missionary school, drainless channel for all the water of the world.⁷ My mother’s dead body, bloated with cheap liquor. Here, I confuse love with pity. Here, I have sick needs.¹

My professor was right about one thing: we shall belong to America by right of conquest. My ungrateful people, striking the first blow. How we reciprocated their kindness with cruelty, their mercy with Mausers. We’re no different than Louisiana, by purchase, or Texas, or Alaska. Save us from ourselves!⁹

Can I tell you something? For a long time,

I was afraid

of being unable to finish

this poem.² Addiction is unique, a stock

taking all upon itself and killing

everything around it.

Colonialism becomes an addiction.

Addiction becomes                a rhizome.

The relation is tragic.³

All these years, all these years.

Oh, anak, where                have you been?

… Running away, I guess.²

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¹Tony A. (1978). Laundry List. Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families. https://adultchildren.org/literature/laundry-list/.

²Dubourg, I. (2023, February 7). The Memories I Ran From Found Me. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/opinion/cuba-the-missing-parts.html.

³Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990).

⁴Cohen-Vera, B. (2022). The World. Shenandoah. https://shenandoahliterary.org/712/the-world/.

⁵Banisalamah, A. (2020). Colonialism, Sexualities, and Culture: A Transnational Interrogation of Caribbean Subjectivities. Papers on Language & Literature, 56(2), 167–197. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

⁶Bondoc, J. (2017, October 10). A reader’s query about ‘alias Rizal’. The Philippine Star. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2017/10/10/1747570/readers-query-about-alias-rizal.

⁷Césaire, A. (2001). Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. (C. Eshleman & A. Smith, Trans.) Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1939).

⁸Andrade, P., Jr. (2015, December 31). Rizal’s alcohol lamp was actually a stove. Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/218103/rizals-alcohol-lamp-was-actually-a-stove/.

⁹Sawyer, F. H. (1900). The Inhabitants of the Philippines. Sampson Low, Marston & Company.