abo sa dila

There are times when I need

to be reminded that I am home.

Cobwebs and the sad texture

of bricks. Wobbly dinner tables. Large,

haunted windows, where the daze

of the afternoon passes through 

the grooves of a small child’s

fingerprints. Where will these lines

lead? What fate do they shape

with their whorls?

And you say they hold no truth.

What will the elders say? The shamans,

nobody will listen…

Only the child convinces. The small fingers

write with colored paint, what old mouths

deign not say

through cracked lips and raisin-leather hands

with glistening eyes of wisdom, lined with crow’s feet

of laughter and pain, pain and laughter—

the same words again, throbbing,

and again from different people:

Home and my little knuckles,

Turning white from the knowledge of shamans:

That the magic goes away.  

Joel Toledo, Marne Kilates, Pancho Villanueva, Sasha Martinez, Karl de Mesa, Mikael de Lara Co, Mo Francisco, Marie La Vina, Glenn Atanacio

Because I cannot be held, let me

tell you that I am a rock, mythical

and heavy and unyielding to wind

and time and all things that speak

of erosion. I am the midsummer heat

saying, Look, Albert, that bird has faded 

into song, the song has faded into memory,

memory has faded into you and you

have faded into memory, mine.

And we will fade as the bird has.

What need for me, then, a word

hollow as the warm barrel of a gun?

My brothers call to me from their graves,

saying mean, because there is no other way

to live. What does it matter? 

Look, Albert, that star has died 

lifetimes ago and yet it burns still. 

Look, Albert, another bird 

is streaking across the sky, another sky

unmindful of the many words for sky

that have died. Look. Let me stay

here some more, dear stranger

that I am, under this vast gray waiting. 

Let me keep my eyes open.

I mean, let me mean

myself for a while.

- Dean Alfar