JOANN BALINGIT

Tanaga: Song Where Every Filipinx Person Is Standing by the Ocean

my filipino father’s
art was to christen each child
with a mother’s memory
held close over centuries

while he held at ocean’s length
his birthplace, his riverbank
and the language I don’t speak—
yet I’m at home in his name

always at home in the world
when the trees sing, hello leaves!
when the earth sings, good-bye leaves!
when inside me I feel words

I cannot sing speak to me
what were the names of the trees
my father said good-bye to?
when my father died I sang


a lullaby: good-bye words!
hello songs I cannot sing!
good-bye words inside a score
the ocean keeps on singing

and I said to her, mothers?
and I said to her, fathers?
and she said to me, they hear
and they said to me, we hear

Notes:
Title after Danez Smith.

Tanaga is an Indigenous Filipino poetry form. This poem appeared in our July/August 2021 issue with three other tanagas by Aileen Cassinetto, Sofia M. Starnes, and Luisa A. Igloria.

Originally appeared in Poetry (July/August 2021)

RICK BAROT

Moving the Bones

There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones.

The poor ones, their graves broken by the roots of trees. The ones whose headstones have been weathered as blank as snow-drifts.

We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones.

The ones killed in the monsoon floods. The one buried in her wedding dress. The one buried with his medals.

Because there will be a time when we cannot keep track of them, scattered in the cemetery like prodigals, we collect the bones.

The ones whose faces I can still recall. The ones who have been dead for a hundred years. We collect their bones. 

At each opened grave, we think about the body taking its shape as father, sister, cousin, uncle. We hunger for the story of each figure.

We hold the bones, though we know memory is mostly forgetting. Or memory is the sweeper who clears the sidewalk each morning. Or memory is the broom.

The mausoleum is marble, white as certain roses, and shaped like a house. There is room for everyone we will put there.

The rich ones, their gravestones glowing with gold paint. The infants with sweet names.  
We open their graves. We move their bones.

Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar, a circle of people with a fading circumference.  

When I think of it long enough, home becomes a confusion of birthplace, hometown, country, and nation.

We walk through the cemetery, we point to our own, and we gather their bones.

Maybe memory is the desperate pharaoh who commands that the things of this life go with him into the next.

I would take with me the books I loved best. A jar of the ocean spanning my two countries. A slip of my lover’s sunny hair.  

I would take with me a sack of rice. My mother’s orange shawl. The robe my father wears in the kitchen at night, drinking a glass of water.  

That we might go to just one place to worship them, to wonder at who they were, we are moving the bones.  

Our tribe of eros and vinegar. Our black hair, our ordinary minds.

Holding the bones, we say the names of the dead, the music of the syllables, conjuring the hearts they answered to.  We hold the bones. 

Each stern skull. Each proud sternum. Each elegant rib, curved like a horizon.

Copyright © 2021 by Rick Barot. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 10, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

JASON BAYANI

21 Spirits

1.

“Brother, might is our immense mother”

Li Young Lee wrote in my book 15 years ago.

(To be honest, I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but I was playing like I did)

Maybe it’s how I can say violence cradles us

and know you’d get what I mean.

The odd comfort of a clenched fist,

how we look for the seam in stone.

I have tried to make a life of poetics, Jon,

and I don’t see a seam, just a brick.

We break shit with heavy objects.

That is what we do when you put it in our hands.

2.

The mystic took one look at you and said,

“This one! This one has 21 spirits watching over him.”

And I wonder if they have been watching me, too.

If they’ve been there for every single mistake.

If every time I fall,

they could only watch me pass through

the impossible cushion of their arms.

3.

Do they only show themselves to you, because I am too afraid?

They don’t make this world for people who see like you do.

What if I’m just too fond of this awful world.

What if this, alone,

is too much to bear, already.

4.

Maybe if I say enough, I’ll get to become a memory

inside of someone else. Maybe they’ll care for me better

than I’ve ever cared for myself. Maybe they’ll say my name

back to me, and it is with all of the tenderness I have tried to learn

and failed at learning.Maybe there will still be time to become

something newer, that time isn’t escaping it’s just shifting

the lens a little. I am much more mortal than I was the day before.

I’d like to be a thought someday. A heavy one.

Something that gets slapped on the table and shudders the body of whoever it gets laid in front of.

5.

A year ago we climbed a church tower in Zurich, Switzerland and watched the city rusting under the frost. You had asked me how I was doing. Which meant you were asking me about her. I told you I was good and the city looks beautiful from up here. I imagine she’d say how typical it would be of us Bayani men, to be so unwilling to communicate completely. She’s not wrong. I don’t miss her. I miss being in love and I mistake that feeling for her sometimes.

6.

Maybe grief is not a singular emotion, but a system,

not felt, but experienced— we are beheld.

7.

I remember one summer Ma forgot to pick you up

from basketball practice.

When we pulled up to the school, you came running at the car

like you were sure you’d be lost forever. You taught me

how long time feels when you are afraid.

How slow it is when you are alone. I promised then

I’d make sure you’d never feel abandoned again.

But when that boy gave you your first hit of crack

I was somewhere else.

8.

When you were three, one of our uncles in the Philippines kept calling to let us know Tatang had passed away. I couldn’t understand what he was saying so I kept hanging up the phone. When you were a baby you got used to Inang speaking to you in tagalog, the slow percussion of her speech. It is inherent in you, the words. All I got is my skin. That’s what I live with. This and everything it carries.

9.

You said the ghosts would haunt you at night.

I don’t believe in these things, but I believe you.

10.

Everywhere you go across the world,

picking up new spirit.

a creeping shadow from Tokyo,

a wailing noise from Instanbul.

Sometimes, you tell me, it is Inang’s hand that wakes you.

You know this because when you were a kid

she would run the back of her knuckles over your spine

as you slept.

11.

I tell you that I know she watches me too

and I am afraid one day I will see her.

You tell me I can ask her to leave me alone.

But Jon, I don’t want her to...

12.

It was an overhand right. I set it up with a few jabs to the body. Had to switch up my stance because you favor kicks with your right leg and kept nailing me on the inside. I hit you in the shoulder and felt my wrist crumple on impact. I hit you hard enough to send you reeling towards the floor. My wrist, it still ain’t right. It was all worth it. I’d do it again.

13.

How many times

they looked at us

and saw trouble,

when all we wanted

was a comfort

in this place

they did not believe

we had a right

to be given.

14.

If ever I get old enough for a cane, I’m gonna hit you with that cane. I’m not trying to get healthier, I’m just trying to get old enough to fight you as a senior citizen.

15.

I’m pretty sure I can still kick your ass. You workout every day of the week and have practiced Muay Thai for five years. All I got are the poems I’ve written and the 8 hours of gym time I barely fit into the week, but when you come home you want to drink wine with me and it makes me want to punch you in the face.

16.

I tried looking up whether or not two brothers had ever fought each other in boxing. As far as I know it’s officially happened twice, in 1993. Marty vs Eric Jubowski and Kusuo vs Katsuaki Eguchi.

Both fights ended in a knockout. The Klitschko brothers said they sparred once and one of them left with a permanent scar on his face and the other, a broken leg.

17.

Everyone I’ve ever punched in the face looked like me.

I swung at a white kid once and missed.

(that has to mean something, doesn’t it)

18.

Maybe they watch us and say,

look at you, the only people

you can really hurt is each other.

Doesn’t that feel like a home?

19.

Often there is a person

trying to tell me something

in the machine of them

is broken,

and what I hear is them telling me

something in the machine

of you will be broken, too.

20.

All I see is the mess,

instead of everything

that has withstood.

21.

I know of no home other than memory.

This wreckage we make wears both our names.

Ain’t no place out here know how to hold us,

the wild noise in our bodies that summons the dead,

this divine armor, this mighty mother.

Originally appeared in BOAAT Journal

CATALINA CARIAGA

A WORD

Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, has become the first Native American Cabinet Secretary of

the Interior in U.S. history. NPR News 3.15.2021

When she testified in February at her confirmation hearing, Haaland began her opening remarks by introducing

herself to senators in her tribal language of Keresan. CBS NEW 3.18.2021

At this very point in time
was the word.
And the word was,
that the language of my parents
had died.

remnants of wars and insurrections    land acquisition

contestations of tribal assertion through     statistical attempts to nationalize consolidation
evolution and adoption     of one language    over others

tightly   gripped    media
facebooking the primary mode    of communication as if

a thousand cuts    of the fake news     breaking up
hand-held computer devices     with slow and intermittent Wi-Fi

vinyl bright 60-foot political banners of the current valoric regime
versus      flagging opposition

arriving by plane, SUV, bus, chrome plated jeepney,
tri-cycles, on foot     slowing at each barangay     through the provinces

a five hour trip becomes ten hours     driving

a narrow path
between the sun dried
palay on concrete.

Here in this time and place
was the word.
And the word was with 9 million native speakers along the western coastal regions
of the island of Luzon…

…and the countries
to which they have migrated…

squatting Baroque church and its colonial motifs in brown adobe stone

exactly    as my mother had described
school in her third tongue,

            Anako, this is where we learned English.

And the word was with her.
And the word
presides     over the rice fields     grasshopper green
to earthen brown         bulul spirits    monolithic in myth

and the word gives atang to the
patience           of our unrelenting ancestors

And the word was silent

and the word was word-of-mouth
and the word was hand-to-mouth
and the word was disseminated from village to barangay to town to city
and the word was blood
and the word was atrocity
and the word was genocide
and the word was rape
and the word was shame
and the word was sorrow
and the word was hunger
and the word was guilt
and the word was depression
and the word was survival

and the word    is    in my DNA

nocturnal YouTube    tutorial    insomniac
losing linguistic heritage at the rate of 26 languages    each year—

one language    lost every two weeks

ampay? / why?
 bakit?  / why?

as Haryette sleeps with the dictionary,
Myung Mi enunciates the sound of the phoneme    ng

wen ngarud / yes, indeed
oo nga / yes, indeed

and the word    is    within    us.

Copyright © 2021 by Catalina Cariaga. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 31, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

AILEEN CASSINETTO

Tanaga: After Katy de la Cruz

For former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III

Ocean-born, I was always
bound to come home to a
sea that has no memory
of me save for my stars, long-

lived and feather-like. So close
to the coastline, I hear sounds
as they move just above the
water’s surface. The rare glide

upward, the slide and swing, the
extra note. Balut, penoy,
balut! Bil— I hear your heart-
beat this far from your shore. What

we saved at the water’s edge
we also left behind, had
hoped to endure—cone shells, red
corallines, O love of mine.

Notes:
With line from “Balut,” lyrics by Jerry Brandy in the 1930s and performed by Katy de la Cruz.

Tanaga is an Indigenous Filipino poetry form. This poem appeared in our July/August 2021 issue with three other tanagas by JoAnn Balingit, Sofia M. Starnes, and Luisa A. Igloria.

Originally appeared in Poetry (July/August 2021)

MARIANNE CHAN

Let’s Talk for a Moment

about the persistence of ice, my father, in Michigan,
trying to manipulate frozen water for months

in his driveway. I can picture him now in his snowsuit,
thick gloves and boots: plowing, shoveling, scraping.

Different types of ice occur depending on speed,
location: drift which floats on the ocean, anchor

at bottom of the sea, freezing rain that icifies midfall,
icicles that weep down store awnings, sharpened

into skewers. Sometimes I dream about the rime
I scraped for years off my windshield, that layer

of solid fog, a pest in the Michigan morning,
when I was running late for Russian class, repeating

the rhyming Pushkin lines I needed to learn that day:
Мороз и солнце; день чудесный! Еще ты дремлешь,

друг Прелестный! I’d say, over and over. And there
were other times when I was injured by ice,

slipping as a child and bursting into tears.
Crying is a sort of melting. We’re all hard ice before

a sudden pain or fear splashes its sun against our
coolness. I remember when my great-grandmother was

on her deathbed, I saw my father cry for the first time,
an avalanche of snow tumbling forward. He rested

his forehead against his inner elbow, leaning against
the bed where she lay. Moments later, he returned

to his habitual stillness. After a few days, I told him
that I’d seen him crying, and he denied it, not wanting

to talk about the warm waters swelling underneath,
not wanting me to know of them. Ice is a quiet,

fragile strength. Lately, I too am held together
by a cold so feeble I can break apart any minute.

But let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk again about snow
and ice, my father in his driveway, an immigrant

to America, laboring over American ice, spooning it up,
like cold rice for breakfast, into a pile in his corner

of the suburbs; let’s talk about my father, who says
he’s not afraid of springtime, hate crimes

against Asians, who tells me he always feels safe
in his city, where he can stay inside his home,

barricaded by snow, avoid other people; my father,
who asks for a door camera for Christmas, who watches

Forensic Files, learns all the different ways one can
get lost or lose someone; let’s talk about the emails

my father sends to my brother and me, a list of his life
insurance, he says It’s time to think about eternity.

When I think of eternity, I always think of ice, the glaciers
that persist for centuries, seracs and crevasses.

It is April, and my mother sends me a picture of their
deck covered in snow. I imagine my father sliding

on his boots, drifting quietly outside to see his wintery
spring, his ungloved hands anchored in his pockets,

his eyes raised to heaven, waiting for more.

Originally appeared in Kenyon Review May/June 2021