Five poems from Black Arcadia forthcoming from the University of the Philippines Press:
Early Death
Wild and ageless one-eyed monster,
tell your damaged darlings not to stay out too late.
Tell them to dream of rare moments, of clarity.
Dream of light nibbling at the bald heads of strangers.
Dream of hats for the headless. Dream of summers
and white sheets drying on the clothesline under the sun.
Dream of what’s pure, of sorting through excesses.
Dream, for once, about not being duped by beauty.
Give your books and paintings away
to the one who could look you in the eye
and say that he found redemption
while marveling at your tortured scrawls.
Settle down. Let’s talk. There’s still time.
Born of Flood
The land of
passage dwindles enough
to accommodate
the water’s course, the sluice
of channels drawn
toward the lowest point.
At last the water
recedes, exposes the floodplain
where members of
the search party gather.
They announce the
names of survivors.
They can’t tell
the rogue sailors from the deckhands.
They don’t
recognize the bloodied mutineers whose
insides glisten
nightly for want of knives to sheathe.
We would have once
found our new trappings odd,
what with
waterproofed filaments and artificial
dorsal fins
protruding from our backs.
This tells us
that the landlocked dwellers
of this colony
are sorely ill-equipped, expendable.
Only luck
separates us from the ones who drowned,
the ones whose
bodies had become bloated,
irreversibly
deformed—bodies that are no better
than woven sacks
that yield in the presence of water.
Days like these,
we dream of drought, of anchorage,
of tyrants
choking on their waterlogged wishlists.
We are the
country of the lonely. We raise
our monochromatic
flag. We arrive in little boats,
singing the song
of our marauding ancestors,
deluding
ourselves how this, too, shall pass, how this
flood carves
terrain like blunt cleaver on telltale flesh
wound—flesh wound
that will not strike bone
and extinction,
flesh wound that will soon heal.
Days like these,
we dream of drought, of anchorage,
of foghorns that
call out our names from the gloom.
The rare swimmers
among us hold their breath
underwater, hold
their breath long enough to haul
what stays alive,
what can still be salvaged.
In the
after-storm, beyond the floating wreckage,
across the water
that laps at the outskirts
of the new city,
the swimmers span the slight
concavity imposed
by surface tension.
Little Boats
We are Little
Boats. We dip our flimsy oars
in the sea of
Return, hoping for buoyancy
and steerage
across the channel, through the fog
where landlocked
savages have built towers
they call
lighthouses, lighthouses with
foghorns that cry
out our names in the gloom.
We sail farther
into the listless blue of the Pacific—
the ancient basin
that will never give up its water.
In the trench, we
find the great sea beasts, the ones
whose dark
apertures are rarely exposed to the light.
They ignore us,
for we are small, unwieldy,
always looking as
if we were about to capsize.
They ignore us,
for we are invisible when we glide
along the path of
good weather, away from squalls,
cutting the water
surface without making a splash.
We are Little
Boats. We row our flimsy oars
to reach your
slowly shrinking inlet to the sea,
your harbor, your
island, the murky water of your city.
How the Empty Came
for Us
Again and again, we ask Ms.
Martha,
who caught the Empty on her left
palm,
her left palm that has long
since
disappeared to the wrist,
“Does it hurt, Ms. Martha?”
She shrugs, a shrug that says either
she doesn’t care or she has
given up
fighting the ravages of the
Empty.
“I’ll be gone before the year’s
end,”
she says. “And no, the Empty
doesn’t
hurt, even as it slowly renders
you
invisible. It’s a peaceful way
to die.”
Everywhere, the Empty takes one
of us away
bit by bit. Oh, how little we
understand.
Us and Them
We may not be aware of it yet, but the people
of the farm can see us, see us and our dense fog
trailing behind us but slowly gaining momentum,
stride as lively as those who have fled to the cities.
But what do they know—these people of the farm?
Don’t they know that we are all
in this together,
in this blissful cathartic wave
of extinction?
Back home, clay wives still blush in the kiln,
silences waft under the doorframe, rickety fences
grow overnight to invade the neighbor’s yard.
We saw the birds before they
turned invisible,
and it wasn’t the birds that
changed but us.
*****
Kristine Ong Muslim
is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including most
recently, the short story collections Age
of Blight (2016) and Butterfly Dream
(2016), as well as the poetry collection Meditations
of a Beast (2016). She serves as poetry editor of LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, a
literary journal published by Epigram Books in Singapore, and was co-editor
with Nalo Hopkinson of the original fiction section for the Lightspeed Magazine special issue, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
Widely anthologized and published in magazines, she grew up and continues to
live in rural southern Philippines. kristinemuslim.weebly.com
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