BAPTISM
The taller men with baseball bats, a tree branch garbled with knots,
log iron, and leftover pipe from the fence they put up last summer.
The shorter men gripping buck knives for slashing at the pig’s neck.
And ripened on a dry slop of peanuts, cornflakes, and newspaper
shavings, moiled between the washer and dryer and shelves of dust-caked
soda bottles, the pig that grew tall enough to sniff and lick the doorknob.
So, from the other side, I watched it turn and, hearing it flicker at night,
dreamt of succoring the pig’s escape. Then, they unleashed it. It
drumming its blunt, fleshy hammers through the downstairs hallway,
its high-pitched cough the air it dragged over vocal chord lathing.
Then, they prodded it across the yard and cornered it under the porch.
So with a ka-thunk the pig, then stilled in its tracks, had to watch
as one of the men crept up and dragged a knife across its neck.
They held the sullen body in their pink, craggy hands, standing up,
in order to catch its blood in a bucket. Blood Mother cooked
into a musty, black blood-food we smothered our rice in. After that,
the men heaved the body on a picnic table wrapped in Glad bags
and tape and rolled the carcass on its back and split the skin down
the long belly, its guts oozing out—all beigy, peachy, and blue like
clouds of chewed bubble-gum or the bulbs of a wilted, worn-in coin purse.
Collapsed hoses, too soft and slick to pile up, spread across the lawn
in pearly pools. Then, carefully, the men excised the gall bladder
before it broke and spoiled the meat, gallbladder curled like a finger
on a folding chair beside them while they emptied the carcass to the snout.
On the grass, the heart and lungs lay, and the throat ridged and perfect
as a staircase. And then, the new backbone a metal rod they pierced
and guided through the carcass. Tackle they hoisted onto some posts,
so—though I can’t remember exactly—they could turn the whole thing
on a spit. How it hovered for hours over the orange coals that startled
whenever the juices dripped, and the rangy smell of singed pork-meat
and charcoal slinked into our sweat, and the pork skin transluted, cells
shimmering amber and snapping easily to the touch, hot loosened fat
down our fingers, until the meat fell apart without having to hack at it.
The men, smoking packs of Kool cigarettes and piling up the empty
Schlitz beer cans, hardly mentioning a thing about the child.
ONE FOOT
Listen and you’ll hear a knock.
Watch the dust lift off the land.
Pray I give up my cane and walk.
Some wind will tear the ears off stalks
Of corn; no sound eviscerates the strand.
I listen close, but hear no knock.
Each footstep, I mill bones to chalk.
Then, sink in soot wherever I stand.
I dream I give up my cane and walk.
In nightmares, wispy pipe-roots block
The blood flow to a leaf-foot, browning, orphaned
On the stem. Listless, I hear the knock
Of the oxygen machine. The good doc
Strings me up a foot, leaves me bland,
Yellow toes. “Go ahead and walk,”
Doc says and hacks the cast to a caulk
Of gauze, peat hair, and loose, tanned
Skin Nurse swabs. Like clockwork knock
Gulls at my windowsill. That bad flock,
The smallest sores pique their demands.
Listen. Do you hear them knock?
Do I pray harder? Wake up. Walk.
GROCERY SHOPPING WITH MY GIRLFRIEND WHO IS NOT ASIAN
Through the doors gleam pyramids
of apples, peaches, broccoli hybrids.
I pronounce a name in Minh, kài lán,
pull back its leaves, and reveal small,
white flowers. All to watch her mouth
the words and make white flowers
translations. She asks what uppo is
and I tell her how my auntie grew
the woody fruit by foot-long beans,
tomatoes my father claimed to grow
on his own. If she needs more, I’ll list
ingredients like a poem, like garlic
onion, ground pork, and potatoes.
Vegetables I don’t have words for
stew for an hour in that poem.
We don’t last long before the blitz
of shiny packaging overwhelms her.
One sea green cellophane submits
to a lime, pea, then a teal wrapper,
the lucky elephant or lotus stamp,
the photographs of curious
food items that luxuriate in broth,
a cartoon sketch of a boy’s face
above some steam lines and a bowl—
delight the angle that his eyes slant
as he devours the noodles. Brands
we differentiate by script, each lilt
depicts the path a language takes
Some brushstrokes end in a tip
sharp as my tongue when I dish out
old-fashioned, Asian lady barking.
The aisles feed into a basin where
aquariums line the walls, and fish
glint beneath fluorescent light bulbs.
When I say, So gorgeous, I feel guilty
eating them, that’s not the half of it.
Next week, we trade-in excess beauty
to shop at the markets my Mother
took me—and I still shop as though
my girlfriend and I had never met,
where we fish beans from boxes;
dodge old ladies throwing elbows
at the fruit bins; scales unraveling
off a fish when a butcher knocks
the daylights out of it. And in time
come the meals we dine on chicken
that stinks of piss-soaked feathers.
LANGUAGE POETRY / GRANDMA’S ENGLISH
Dos / doze / those / toes shuffles through my head
when Grandma speaks, consonants blurred
from her mouth a flat tire. Unable to make out
each word I try reading lips, What / that / cat woman,
but end up lost. Her lips relaxed, bursts of sound
fretting through them. You muddy her, Grandma barks
at my father. You muddy her, she drives you grazy.
A child, I love their arguments, never fully
understanding what Grandma means when
she tells Dad, She get you rosin / rousing / rosing.
You watch. She geep driving you grazy. Though
I do get when Grandma says, / gahng /, for can,
and when she says, / gahng /, for can’t.
When she curses, wants sympathy—like,
/ Gahng / it raw meat. It gives you gancer.
Look it’s / rrrud /, she blusters. Her r
like she’s starting a lawn mower. / Rrraw / meat,
Charlie, she argues, shows it to my father.
Marinade, he answers. And Grandma gives up.
A martyr she says, Go on, it it. Her tongue
forcing sparks from our household English.
Beauty when she grabs her chest and sighs,
I gahng go up dos stairs, Charlie. My art, my art!
O the Eyes that will see me,
And the Mouth that will kiss me.
And the Rose I will stand on,
And the Hand that will turn me.
—José García Villa
TRES MUJERES
1.
She watches from the chair.
Two lovers unlock the hatches
of each other’s shirts. Crowbarring
of their wasp-sprung mouths where lips
eave together. Their bras barbed
to the bed. When their arms sigh
into place the fireplace toolery.
In an hour or so the phone rings.
The receiver from her paw—knuckles
fast and cum-crusted—to the spotty
drop cloth. In her ear the rumpus
it’s 10:00 it’s 10:00
2.*
across the bed h h h
h all the air at her back
h breath on her neck and neck on her lips
h quickened over a scissor leg
when h threads her arm across the other lovers
she scores homophones
there their they’re
3. (Scratched Sapphics)
My magandang naman.* Don’t have any
words for making this better. Sadness,
perfect leavening, tugs the heart’s ill-fitting
What capacity feels like: emptiness and
ache. A backwardly line, the needle luring
thread though the holes that’ve been pierced already. Stars, so
gravity-cooked, they
bead to cushioning blackness. Tell as much as
need be: Nothing can worsen how she feels now.
Tell yourself, about anything you need to.
Heart, rest a little.
LAS MENINAS / THE MAIDS OF HONOR
—Museo del Prado, España
Thirteen, I stumble
into the princess’ gaze.
She’s composed, defiant.
Morning slants through
the workshop window
and charges the threads
of her blonde hair.
The Infanta Margarita
wearing a corset so tight
light spikes from it, like
a chest plate worn by
conquistadors in paintings
of Cortés announcing
himself to the Aztecs.
From one maid’s tray
la infanta grabs a piece
of amber-colored fruit
that glows warm as a heart,
while the maids search
the porcelain of her face.
Dwarves Maribarbola
and Nicolasito, and a dog,
accompany her, serving
as amusement while
she poses.
Another maid teeters
behind the Infanta, unrumpling
the lace of the princess’ sleeve
that goes astray each time
her arm grazes the boughs
of her skirt, boughs wired to
spread the fabric at her waist
and send it tumbling, a tissuey,
stuffed tun to the floor.
The Infanta shows
no regard for Velázquez
who also gazes from inside
the painting, onto the world
that lay beyond the borders
of the painting’s framework.
Somehow, Velázquez has
captured that world, too.
The King and Queen of Spain
pose, there. Mere reflections,
they appear as brief, bluish
swaths of paint, in a mirror
that hangs in the background
on a dark rear wall.
All of us onlookers
in the museum’s corridor,
standing beside the King and Queen,
a troupe of royal attendees
blued into existence by Velázquez,
who’s turned his giant canvas
to obscure our view on
the action of his brush.
How he heaves ochre-sopped
bristles across the oily likenesses,
giving the royals’ yards of skin
a taintedness—the illusion that,
with every breath, they ingest
the same bleak air we do,
the room tinged with flecks
of green and purple debris.
I gaze and the Princess
gazes back through me.
She’s luminous, a godly idea
etched into human form.
The rest of us abide with her
perfection, infallibility. So much
like the maids who ratchet up
their heavy velvet dresses
that razor dust off the floor.
Those dresses they must harness,
to concoct each step anew
as they try to walk.
BECOMING
The form letter reads: If you dream
of being Miss USA, this is your chance
to turn that dream into reality!
In disbelief, I turn the envelope over.
State Pageant Office. Naca—that’s me.
Mail in bio and recent photograph.
Always Miss Nothing in photographs,
I had the desire to fulfill Mom’s dream,
Filipina beauty queen, but a fat chance.
By ten, I was shouldering the reality
of a size eighteen blazer. Not over
weight, just big, a saleslady braced me,
sensing Mom was about to scold me
from the Casual Corner. That photograph,
lost to the panels of a drawer, I dream
out of me. But this letter reads chance—
a word more potent than reality.
At least to a poet mulling over
chance into change, small changings over,
how day-to-day I chance to change me
more permanently. The old photograph,
that suited me, I alter in my dreams.
Thinking it, I set my heart to chance.
Writing it, reality.
So, why not this other reality?—
where my real, my realm is turned over,
exposing some dolled-up, plastic me,
the makings of a bad photograph;
nightmares scare up new dreams to dream.
Why deny myself the chance,
when life’s so chancy, chancy
and (perhaps) even destined? Reality
is just most people can’t get over
beauty, can’t get by or past it. Not me,
my poems, at least, aren’t photographic,
symbols perfectly minted from dreams.
They’re just a way to outlast reality,
to take my chances and live life over,
and be me, beyond a photograph.
FALLING, CALLE ORIZABA
—Mexico City
1.
Before I look, I test aceras with a rubber foot.
sidewalks
A glass leg extends from the street and comes to a hook my hand handles.
Me: a doorstop guffaws over planks of hardwood.
Each step, the arms of a clock tilt closer and closer towards noon.
2.
Once I shook my foot loose from a hueco in the asfalto.
pothole
Once I shook my foot and it twinkled like a burned-out fuse.
Once I shook my breath loose inside my lungs and heard the ball-bearing’s timbal.
Once I shook on a curb, in darkness.
3.
Then the filaments of the woozy harp tolled the doorbell.
Then, she held the stringy cheeks of my purpling palms.
I dialed up my feelings: my fingers wound numbers around the rotary phone’s spindle.
Okay. This is me now: her hip bumps the table and the red in the wineglass bumbles.
In the bath, my belly button breathes when it comes to the surface.
A knock in the soapy water is just a heartbeat calling.
WHAT I DON’T TELL MY CHILDREN ABOUT THE PHILIPPINES
—Lingayen Beach, 1977
I don’t tell lies. Memory’s more
beautiful th
an truth. So I say,
the air was blossoming jasmine trees
and smoke. And it’s true.
Clothes boiled in tin tubs. A child,
I watched my uncle splinter
arms of bamboo, his dark skin a blur
in steamy drizzle. A woman
with the burning end of a cigarette
turned inside her lips. Her smile,
a mouth of pink gums squeezed
together. Mornings, my brother and I
raced down the soft belly of the beach,
climbed palm trees—grasping circular rungs
like a throat—to see coconuts churning
in the surf; the skeleton of a torn-down
fighter plane, its snapped propellers,
dented cockpit; fire holes on the beach
where my family came down at night
Dad drank San Miguels and never quit
talking. Filipinos laughed at him.
Mom sat, embarrassed, in the sand.
My cousins, brother, and I stripped cane.
The story ends there for children,
but you wait in bed to hear the rest—
how the air was steam, mosquito incense.
Auntie Marietta set the table. Lanterns
turned her skin red/blue.
I sat in the clubhouse watching
old men play pool till one said
I look old enough to kiss.
GLOVE
[She] knocks, saying ‘Open for me, my [sister], my love, my dove, my perfect one’…My love thrust [her] hand through the opening, and my feelings were stirred for [her].
—Song of Solomon 5: 2–4, from Christiansex.com/fist
She pinches at
the rough seams
where the glove