Self-Portrait as Sister

Sister, for you I’ve made a world within this poem’s mouth,
since each mouth was created for constellations
of desire. In this poem, our general biographies
haven’t changed: we were still born in one land,
raised in another, and live in cities perpetually
foreign to us. Because there’s nothing wrong with that.
But in here, our supple tongues weren’t raised measured by how close
our Englishes sounded to “the real thing.” Here our tongues are proud
maps that guide us back to ourselves. Here we aren’t sent whitening face
masks of cactus extract and lemon oil (only moisturizing ones) by aunts
concerned about our darkening skin tones, our unabashed flirting
with the sun. Here people’s kindness doesn’t deny
who we are.  Here we aren’t set apart
at customs, led like lambs to a gray room at the back,
where officers are numb with suspicion and the air is stagnant from travelers,
families, holding their breaths and onto the warm sweat of each
other’s hands as the seconds turn them colder.
In this poem, they are not there either,
and none of us have missed our connecting trains or worried
any friends. Here, sister, you don’t cry while clutching at the phone,
as if it were the unraveling, pastel-pink comfort
blanket we used to share as babies. Aloneness hasn’t driven us
into pining for a life where we try to fit into a shoe box
of a country, and our differences haven’t made us
smaller in the squinting gaze of others. Here I promise
no love will end in assimilation. It’ll just not
end. Here I don’t wish us belonging. I wish us
the benediction of bell flowers and bees
and beloveds who’ll hum with us sleepy songs.
I wish us here and beyond this poem: here, sister, here.

______________________________

Asterism by Ae Hee Lee is available via Tupelo Press.

I began writing this poem on my way to Palestine on December 25th, 2023. I sent early sections to Huda as I was writing and her comments started taking the form of stanzas, so I invited her to write more. We were writing to each other, back and forth; I, in Bethlehem, and she, in Philadelphia, with nothing on our minds but Gaza.

We each have a relationship with T.S. Eliot’s poem and found writing against it, and through it, a way of centering the horrors of this unprecedented moment. The idea was to displace “The Waste Land,” to challenge its Eurocentric currents and place it in Gaza now, and in Palestine in general. A “wasteland” is being created in “the holy land,” and has been for the past 75 years. As always, the American-European war machine is mobilized to wreak terror in the lands of “others.”

The world is complicit in the horrors we are witnessing in Gaza and in Palestine today. Time from now on will be marked by Gaza, and its movement only toward a free Palestine.

–Ahmad Almallah

Holy Land, Wasted

1
April is not that bad actually:
August is the cruelest month!
Say what you may of memory and desire,
the faint smell of semen
trees the Americans brought
to the “Middle East”—those
strange words we inhaled in
the garden of Bethlehem Uni,
the same smell at AUB, another
American campus on native lands.
We looked at one another,
and we couldn’t put words
to work, we thought of the naked
figures we wound our bodies into—
all for what?!
—————–Marie Marie
is my Deutsch instructor, the one
who wiped chalk on her butt cheeks,
only to add insult to injury. Of course
we were horny teenagers waiting
for a sign of the flesh to make
itself visible. Did you know,
dear reader, that we learned German
in Palestine? What a strange
destiny it was to be sent to the
the German Head Master’s office
when I dealt my English teacher
a verbal blow. He asked me
“upon mischief”: would you
drop yourself in a well if some
one told you to. I said: it really depends,
dear master,
———on the depth of the well,
———of course!

2
Table meets chair: I tell you, there is no need
to make grand statements
that have been all made
in the past, anyway there are chairs, and
tables—everywhere:
some of them squeak when dragged, some
doze off all day, not knowing what has been
sitting on them—but the tables don’t care
much for anything, they see what the
chairs go through, they see in the Hofgarten –
how they are left feet up all night:
it’s a disaster recurring with some regularity now:
since the creation of tables and chairs,
and although the two have lived together
for some time, both maintain they have
nothing to do with one another—too complete,
different species? things? sharing some
physical ground, but lacking chemistry.

Table meets chair: the game of chess
remains the most played board
game in the world. How could
this be in the age of jolts and flashes?
Where do they find the time
to arrange tragedy on the board,
plot and strategy?
Where do they find pawns
to sacrifice themselves, one square
at a time, to accept the smaller fates,
while kings and queens huddle
backstage, twirling their fingers,
expecting glory to meet them halfway?

Table meets chair: In an age of boredom, they map
their courses to glory from a distance.
They scheme, from a distance,
when there is only one recourse:
Touch, skin on skin, more or less,
——-_a body to offer:
——-_one’s own as proof
——-_or someone else’s as loot.

3
The river has its tents. Apparently.
And because we are, dear Pal, the people
of the tents—not because
of our Bedouin pasts, and all that
poetry, just because we at every bend
are killed, our blood
spilled.
Against the rivers
and their beds, East
and West banks, we mine
the land with nothing
but our feet.
Let’s stop there. No need to repeat
the old record broken.
Please turn the volume up.
Hear the screams:
It’s scratching again.
Safiyya, could you please bring
the volume down. Hand me
my down pills or will you
hang me instead?
I can’t face the world.
Let’s stay in, and drink
our blood soup! Oh but the hours
are coming into play: kill kill
kill the hours. It’s not good
for your nerves to watch
all that news, the sights
of dead children not good
for your sleep. Please, Safiyya. Shut
down your screens. But beware
and listen carefully. Do nothing.
Do not shoot yourself
in the foot. And those shadows we
see on screen: how could
they go up against the tanks with
no shoes? Barbaric! Their
killings are not timed
well, not timely.
It’s impossible to watch it
all.
Safiyya, Safiyya, I’m going
to sleep. I’ll take you with me
one day, and you’ll see. For now
I want you to focus on your
teeth. Look at yourself in the
mirror. Hold on tight.
Do you see a face beside
yours? Look no more if you
do! Yes. Good night, Safiyya,
good night, dear shadows in the
background. Good night, dear
dead babies. Now you’ll finally
be able to sleep, and give
us all a moment’s peace.

4
Son of man, a heap of broken
images, you say, and I say, then
she says and he says. What do
we know of the big heap. STDs
sound awfully abbreviated, and
the kids do get their feed every
dark day. Clickety clack, clickety
clack: no one knows root or
————————_branch:
————————_Yes the
————————_sun is
———-warming over our heads, or
is it the earth getting unbearably
hot. The moats boil beyond our siege;
to motes the world crumbles, shattered
like these useless mots. What’s this
talk of French stuff, and warm
kisses that are two centuries old?
Well, cool it down, Bro.
Buy yourself another century or
two. Be done with it you dusty fool!
This is the apocalypse in you talking.
This is the time of beginnings,
of ends. Who really cares? Well,
I do. I really do, and I promise
you, whoever you are, another
wasted land in another promised
land, another time and another
dimension, where the same folk
will rule again, and bury us all
in their gardens, over and over, in
this, the first life
and the other.

5
Tomorrow or the day after, I’ll
pack my things and off to hell.
Another visit to Palestine.
I tell you,
I have a fucked-up land, and
a fucked-up family in that neck
of the woods, as the Americans
would have it: all in ashes, all
in ashes. I tell you, my tongue
is tied up today, and maybe will
forever be after this and that
genocide. I tell you straight out, but you
you want me to suffer my pronouncements
and syllables.
The best way to solve
your problem is to save time,
—————-_eradicate me.
I just don’t seem to add up
to more than a zero on the side
of numerical figures that only
appear to you when your work is done.

6

————-Phlebas was really the Palestinian.
Phoenician was just the story he told
to pass under the wire,
slip through the edges of cities,
————unreal.

              He counted his bones every night,
his teeth too, thinking of rubble. He dreamed of the cry of gulls,
and the deep sea swell and wished for death by water,
a rendezvous with the sea, at least,
an escape from the siege
of burning sands, at last.

                 He passed the stages of his age and youth,
waiting for the rocket to fall. No death,
the sound of death only.

                   Gentile or Jew, O you
who click and swipe, turn and fold
the blood drenched screens into your eyes,
consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

               He didn’t drown. Thirsty, his body overflowed
with unlived days. They spilled out,
—–and a flood of blood,
———————trickled in the sand.

I first encountered Irma Pineda’s poetry in the Mexico City literary journal Generación in 2005, as I was writing a nonfiction book set in her home region (No Word for Welcome, Nebraska, 2011). Pineda’s language, Didxazá (Isthmus Zapotec), has a written literary history that extends back 2,500 years, when Zapotecs began carving their history into stone stelae.

In 2008, Pineda mailed me a copy of her fourth book: Xilase qui rié di’ sicasi rié nisa guiigu’ / La nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos. My favorite of the collection’s thirty-six bilingual (Didxazá/Spanish) poems is the one that appears here, an untitled poem from the series “On the Path / Lu neza / Sobre el camino.” This poem’s imagery and manifestation of the book’s title enchant me. The personification of the house is inherent in the original Didxazá: ruaa is both mouth and door, guichaíque is both hair and roof.

Long before I found a home for Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater (thanks, Deep Vellum!), I tried twenty-one times to publish “[The houses of your village have eyes]” in literary journals. This favorite poem became my most rejected translation. I am grateful to Berlin’s SAND Journal for selecting it in 2015 and to Lit Hub for selecting it now.

–Wendy Call

*

“The houses of your village have eyes”

The houses of your village have eyes
that seek the beach’s sandgrains
in the distance they see the sun
that doesn’t shine on their heads today
doesn’t brighten their shingle-tresses
painted black, red and soft colors
Who lives under the pink or yellow roofs?
Who is in the dark houses?

Winding toward the mountains the only
visible artery of your village’s body disappears
perhaps because
it’s the path that leads to the sea
gloomy village
showing only one mouth-door
painted red

Where did its lifeblood go?
Did its unbearable silence scare away
the dogs?
There are no children in the street,
not even robbers prowling the roofs
Even the birds have gone away…

*

Ca yoo xquidxilu’ napaca’ lu
cuyubica yuxi nisado’
cayuyadxica’ gubidxa
cadi cuzaani íqueca’
cadi cutiee guichaíque dexa ca’
dié nayaase, naxiñá ne na té
Tuunga nabeza xa’na’ íque yoo na té ne naguchi ca ya?
Tulaa ndaani’ ca yoo nacahui ca?

Neza ca dani riniti
tobiluchasi neza rihuiini ndaani’ guidxi
tisi ndi nga ni ribee binni
ruaa nisado’
Guidxi nacahuigá
ni cului’si ti ruaa
dié naxiñá

Paraa zé xrinibe?
Xquendadxido’be nga bichibi
bi’cu’ la?
Qui guinni xcuidi lu guidxi
ni gubaana qui richesabi íque yoo
Ca manihuiinica laaca zié ca’…

*

Las casas de tu pueblo tienen ojos
que buscan arenas de la playa
ven a lo lejos el sol
que hoy no brilla sobre sus cabezas
no ilumina sus cabellos-tejas
pintadas de negro, rojo y suaves colores
¿Quién habita bajo los techos rosas o amarillos?
¿Quién en las casas obscuras?

Rumbo a las montañas se pierde
la única arteria visible del cuerpo de tu pueblo
acaso porque ésta sea
el camino que lleva al mar
Pueblo sombrío
que sólo enseña una boca-puerta
pintada de rojo

¿Adónde fue su sangre?
¿fue su insoportable silencio
el que asustó a los perros?
No hay niños en la calle,
ni siquiera ladrones brincando por los techos
Las aves también se marcharon…

______________________________

Nostalgia Doesn’t Flow Away Like Riverwater by Irma Pineda and translated by Wendy Call is available from Deep Vellum.

We are poets, but Lauren is also a visual artist who writes graphic novels and short comics. We’ve collaborated a couple of times before on what Lauren calls poem-comics. It’s a genre that brings together two forms that usually don’t have a lot of truck with one another, where the visual accompaniments create something new out of the two forms.

Jesse and Lauren met in Iowa City, and eventually began collaborating. Lauren would take a poem and deepen it by creating a graphic element—by adding new layers and visual rhythms, by bringing out elements in the words that were latent but unseen in the poem. It’s not that Lauren illustrates it, but more that she makes another kind of poem out of it, inside it, and the two entwine to create a new, genre-less poetry. At least that’s one of the ways we think about it. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it.

The words in this one come from translations of sayings from the region of Kansas where Jesse grew up, arranged in such a way that the lines speak to and against one another. It’s a voice that turns out to be many voices, a voice that feels the truth in extreme and contradictory positions.

—Jesse Nathan and Lauren Haldeman

*

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963 and continues to live there. Like almost everyone in Gaza during the Israeli assault, he has been displaced and communication has been sporadic. Despite this, a poem of his appeared in Amman, several weeks ago, written and sent on the three percent of battery power left on his phone after a family member had been able to use a solar charger.

*

“Dead Cats Continue to Meow”

Behind the walls of the grade school, while the students lined up to salute the flag, the younger kids flay cats alive, they hang the furs on tall sticks, they circle around the school with a continuous meow. The parents, who concluded that their kids became cats, sprinkled salt on the neighborhood’s streets to remove the stench of absence, and washed again and again the children’s clothes for a holiday that won’t come.

A blind man listening to a match replay on his radio said to curious runners-by:
don’t hurry, the match ends with the defeat of both teams; but they didn’t get the joke. They stole his radio and left him cursing the politicians. In those days, we didn’t pay attention to the complaints of walls—so much blood was on them, who cares about walls that complain? One morning, we didn’t find homes, just heaps of red words piled like dirty clothes on sidewalks, no one cared about them either; couples, though, continued—and without walls—their usual business, not only that, but they made more kids who flayed more cats inside the school.

The heart doctor treating me now recommends only one thing:
stop writing the diaries of a dead village.

______________________

Translated by Emna Zghal, Khaled al-Hilli, and Ammiel Alcalay
for the Brooklyn Translation Collective

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth
April 15, 2006

______________________________

“Revenge” by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, from Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations by Peter Cole. Copyright © 2017 by Peter Cole. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved

______________________________

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1933 in the village of Saffuriya and died in Nazareth in 2011. So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin is available from Copper Canyon Press.

“You see, for me art’s not one of life’s ornaments, [a] rococo relaxation to be greeted affably after a day of hard work; I’m inverted on this: for me it’s my very breath, the one thing necessary, and all else is excretion and a latrine.”
–Arno Schmidt, Nobodaddy’s Children

“The poet is not true to his word if he doesn’t change the names of things.”
–Nicanor Parra, “Changes of Name”
*

For both initiated and uninitiated readers of Marlon Hacla’s poetry, there are several ways to approach this publication of his sophomore collection, so aptly entitled Glossolalia (originally published in the Philippines by High Chair in 2013). These are not, by any means, ironclad conditions that need to be met in order to fully understand the unrelenting force and elemental fury that suffuse the poems in the collection.

As intuited by one of the collection’s poems entitled “Ostinato,” any prospective reader of Glossolalia can treat what I am about to spell out as “sacrilege[s] against the source of mental clarity,” or obstinate intimations on the contours of Marlon Hacla’s poetry.

1.
The first and most obvious approach—for both types of readers—is to regard this Glossolalia as an entirely new work resulting from a translation. As such, readers familiar with Hacla’s work and its source language (Filipino) can marvel at the new ways in which the collection’s opacities, barrage of incongruent ideas, and commitment to insistence are reproduced in a new language. On the other hand, those who are new to Hacla’s work and who have no knowledge of the material’s source language will have the first-time opportunity to navigate, via Kristine Ong Muslim’s clever and resourceful translation, Glossolalia’s labyrinthine passageways.

For readers like myself, the experience of reading Hacla’s work in two languages is similar to that of the persona from the poem “Halfway Through Eternity”—that is, finally seeing two different “glints of light” that were once imperceptible. There are two levels to this brand-new mode of perception. The first is being able to comprehend in the translation certain opacities previously undetectable in the original. Even Muslim, in her translator’s note, admits to utilizing explanatory phrases to make sense of translated passages she felt lacked the clarity of the original.

This impulse to illuminate is evident in the translation of the poems “Ecclesiastes” (“Eklesyastes”), “Howl” (“Panaghoy”), and “Bundle” (“Tungkos”), among others. Needless to say, this proves that some of Muslim’s decisions as a translator have been influenced by the generative quality of Hacla’s poetry. Thus, the process of translation ceases to be merely an act of absolute fidelity or replication, instead becoming the very site of the production of sense and meaning. The second level, meanwhile, constitutes being able to notice the successful rendering of the original’s incongruent images, revelatory arcs, off-kilter neologisms, and intentionally crude turns of phrase in the resulting translation.

This, I believe, is what Muslim means when she says, “I chose the language that I felt best captured the spirit of the book.” For English-language readers, there will certainly be moments of pause and surprise in the face of passages strung together in the most unexpected ways. The syncopated tempo of the poems, more so evident in the translation, might be jarring for some as well.

In my case, however, reading the resulting translation of Hacla’s poems afforded me new ways of experiencing the conceits that drew me towards his poetry in the first place: its maximalist gestures, visceral force, constant dose of delirium and drama, and unflinching revolt against everything that suppresses a poem’s iterability. In relation to that last point, Muslim’s translation is able to make legible what the late Jean-Luc Nancy called the inscribed “infinite resistance” in all literature.

For English-language or first-time readers, things are somewhat simpler. They get to experience Glossolalia and the full force of Hacla’s poetry in a language that is more or less familiar to them. Further questions about the collection, the poet, and the reading experience itself will only arise once the specter of comparison, the need to find a precedent or parallel tradition, begins to haunt them. This brings me to my second intimation.

2.
This approach involves the search for a precedent or a parallel poetic tradition that can serve as a cushion for the untelegraphed flicker jabs of Hacla’s poetry. This may come in the form of comparisons to writers (or artists of other mediums) who give off the same electric energy and irreverent disposition present in Glossolalia. I have, for instance, written elsewhere that in some respects the structure of Hacla’s almost unbroken prose poems in Melismas (OOMPH! Press, 2020) can be compared to the long atonal overtures of the oft-misunderstood jazz musician Cecil Taylor.

The same holds true for most of the poems in Glossolalia. Take, for example, the slew of seemingly unrelated vignettes in poems such as “Rosanna” and “Dance on the First Day of Wandering.” Meanwhile, the collection’s sometimes digressive (but always whimsical) paeans to documentary photographers like Josef Koudelka and Shomei Tomatsu read like Javier Marias’ erudite and essayistic narratives about obscure historical figures.

This intentional maneuver of Hacla to obfuscate in order to stretch the limits of meaning, his refusal to be tied down by the age-old dictum of organic unity, is probably the heart of most of his poetic projects. Instead of a period or a full stop to signal the completion of a single thought, what we get from the poems in Glossolalia is an almost infinite stream of “and,” as if signaling to readers that signification has always been an act of stubborn insistence.

For readers familiar with the almost always contentious tradition and history of Philippine poetry, placing Hacla under the confines of a specific movement or period is a tricky proposition. For one, Hacla made his mark by necessarily exercising all possible détournements against the Philippine literary establishment. Save for his maiden collection, all of his books were published by small presses. Unlike most writers in the Philippines, he is not formally affiliated with major academic and literary institutions.

Moreover, in an attempt to forge a union between computer science and poetry, Hacla launched the poetry-generating robot called Estela Vadal in 2018. Reminiscent of non-anthropocentric literary projects such as Christian Bök’s The Xenotext (Coach House Books, 2015), Hacla’s Estela Vadal raises questions about the possible origins and dispensers of poetry. For another, I agree with Muslim’s claim that Hacla is the first and only poet in the Philippines who uses “…maximalism as an aesthetic and generative tool.”

Eschewing the spare language, subtle imagery, and quietism featured in most contemporary Philippine poetry, Hacla’s poems, especially here in Glossolalia (and in its informal sequel Melismas), read like an unapologetic statement against the New Critical tradition that has been pushing its weight in the Philippine literary scene for more than half a century. While most of my predecessors and contemporaries in the field would probably take me to task for the previous claims, shackling Hacla’s poetry to the foundations of a tradition it militates against is just inaccurate. This brings me to my last intimation.

3.
This involves the nasty (but sometimes necessary) business of gatekeeping. This involves the crude expectation that a translated text should always carry with it the hopes and aspirations of the literary culture that birthed it. This also involves the provincialism of writers and critics rearing its ugly head. This provincialism ultimately leads to translation analyses done by critics or writers who have not themselves experienced the labor of translation.

While I am not saying all of this to absolve translation from criticism, or to argue for its immutability, I will always take a stand against readings that use the veneer of “fidelity to the original” as a way to disguise fealty to a certain tradition. In the case of Glossolalia and Hacla’s poetry, there is no other recourse but to translate against the grain. Only then will the Babel yearned for by the persona in the poem “Dance in the Fortieth Day of Wandering” emerge from the ashes and rubble of tradition.

— Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III

*

“Ang Nagpapanginig sa Lahat ng Aking Mga Salita”

Sa gitgitan ng mga puno ng akasya, parang may naghugas ng pabango sa paligid, may nag-iwan ng galit sa mga tinapakang gumamela. Sino ang magsasabing sa gitna ng gabing ito, may magbubukas ng galeriya ng mga implikasyon ng iyong mga salita? Sa tuwing magkukuwento ako ng panaginip, magbibigay ka ng paliwanag. Sa tuwing ididetalye ko ang disenyo ng mga sagot para sa katanungan mo tungkol sa pagdadalamhati, pagdurusa, paghihirap na tila noong una’y inakala nating nagapi na ng sarili nating pagsusumikap, ngunit sa katotohanan, nanahimik lamang palang tila isang isinaradong baul ng mga sumpa, tinututop ng iyong palad ang aking bibig at sinasabing, sshhh, sshhh, hubaran mo ako ngayon din at patatawarin ko ang iyong kahangalan, dadalhin kita sa kakahuyan, dadalhin kita sa halikan ng tubig-alat at buhanginan, sa dilim ng mga arko, dadalhin kita sa bukana ng pintong magpapatuloy sa huling limang gabi ng iyong kaluwalhatian, dadalhin kita sa hindi natatapos na wakas ng tubig, dadalhin kita sa matrimonyo ng unang dalawang araw ng iyong paghihingalo, dadalhin kita sa ibabaw ng ragasa ng ilog, sa ilalim ng libingan ng mga nalimot, dadalhin kita at ilalapit sa makinis na batok ng iyong iniirog, sa kaguluhan ng kanyang kaselanan, dadalhin kita sa hapon, sa pagliliwanag ng araw, sa pagitan ng sakit at ligaya, dadalhin kita sa kaganapan ng pagdidilang-anghel ng iyong mga kaaway, dadalhin kita sa bawat bersiyon ng salawahan mong kaluluwa, sa paanan ng Ina ng Laging Saklolo, sa unang salita ng iniwan mong wika, dadalhin kita sa mga awit ng sarili mong kapangyarihan, sa lugar na hindi matatarok ng sarili mong kapangahasan, sa tuyong lalamunan ng iyong minamahal, sa pahingahan ng isinugo upang undayan ka ng siyamnapu’t siyam na saksak, dadalhin kita sa silangan, sa alegoryang ginawa ng pagtatatwa mo sa iyong identidad, at doon, hahawiin ko ang mga tinik, babanlawan kita ng alak, hahaplusin ko ang iyong mga binti, at mangangako akong babantayan ko nang may takot at pag-aalala ang bawat mong hakbang.

“What Makes All My Words Tremble”

In the jostling spaces of acacia trees, someone nearby must have rinsed with perfume, must have ditched rage among the trampled hibiscus. Who would have said that in the middle of this night, there is a gallery opening that holds the implications of your words? Whenever I talk about my dreams, you give me an explanation. Whenever I detail the design of the answers to your questions on grieving, misery, suffering, all of which we assume at first to have been overcome by our efforts, but the truth is that they are simply quieted down like a shuttered trunk of curses, your palm is trying to hush my mouth with a sshhh, sshhh, take off my clothes right now so I might forgive your insolence, I will take you to the woods, I will take you to a place where the seawater kisses the sand, under the shade of the stone arches, I will take you to the passage leading to a door that allows you to carry on the last five days of your ecstasy, I will take you to the endless death of water, I will take you to the matrimony of the first two days of your death throes, I will take you over the rapids in the river, underneath the burial grounds of the forgotten, I will take you and nudge you close to the smooth nape of the one you love, to the bedlam in her loins, I will take you in the afternoon, by the lifting of the day’s overcast, between pain and bliss, I will take you to the satisfying conclusion of your enemies’ prescient words, I will take you to every version of your mercurial soul, at the foot of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, by the first word of the native tongue you have abandoned, I will take you to the songs that are your power, to a place whose scale is immeasurable to your fearlessness, down the parched throat of your beloved, in a refuge created so you can be stabbed ninety–nine times, I will take you eastward, to the allegory that results from your self-denial, and there, I will whisk away the blanket of thorns, wash you down with liquor, stroke your thighs, and vow to watch over your every step with dread and care.

*

“Nayon”

Inutusan akong kumuha ng mga kahoy na panggatong. Ipinahiwalay sa akin ang panganib sa pamamagitan ng isa pang panganib. Para akong pinasabog. Napunta ako sa lahat ng dako. Gumawa ako ng isang panibagong buhay. May ilaw sa aking balikat at gumaling ang lahat ng pumila sa aking bahay mula sa pagkakaratay at mula sa pagkawili sa mababangong halaman. Nabundat ako nang nabundat. Nawalan ako ng karanasan ng kabaliwan. Isang ipinintang bangkay ang nagsalita gamit ang mga ipinintang salita at para sa akin, ito ay kasagutan sa mga tanong natin tungkol sa kamatayan. Ako ay naging punong-abala ng maituturing na mga karit ng isang pamayanan, isang pamayanang abala sa paghahakot ng mangga at lansones, isang pamayanang natutulog na parang isang pamayanang walang inililihim. At tungkol sa mga lihim, inalam ko ang lahat ng mga lihim pati ang lihim ng hangin, ng baging, ng isang pusod na araw-araw nililinis, pati ang lihim na sinasabi ng mga ibon bago sila bumitaw sa sanga upang tuluyan nang mamatay, upang tuluyan nang matigil ang kanilang mga awit. Minsan akong natisod sa burol at napatingin sa paligid. Ang nayon na aking pinagmulan ay dalawa nang nayon at ang dalawang nayon ay magkaparehong-magkapareho ng hugis, bilog na bilog, parehong may bukid ng pakwan at patola, parehong may pulang bahay kung saan ako isinilang. Nakaramdam ako ng saya at takot at pag-aalinlangan at hindi ko malaman kung anong nayon ang aking itatakwil, kung anong nayon ang aking pipiliin.

“Town”

I was ordered to gather firewood. I was told to disassemble a threat by using another threat. I could have been a detonated bomb. I was spread all over the place. I created a new life. A light source turned up on my shoulder, and all the people who queued at my doorway were healed from their bedridden state and from their addiction to aromatic herbs. I ate too much, and then I ate some more. I had lost my touch for lunacy. A painted corpse began to talk using painted words, and for me this is the answer to our questions about death. I became the host of those considered to be the scythes of a community, a community busy gathering mangoes and lanzones, a community that sleeps like a community that has no secrets. And when it came to secrets, I knew all about secrets, even the secret of the wind, the cliff, the one navel that had to be cleaned daily, even the secret divulged by birds right before they decide to let go of a branch and plunge to their death, silencing at last all their songs. I tripped once, stumbled on a tomb, and began to look around. The town I had come from is now two towns, and the two towns have exactly the same shape, perfectly rounded, both with farmlands where watermelon and silk squash grow, both with the exact same red house where I was born. I am happy and scared and unsure and I don’t know which town I should disown, which town I should take.

*

Kristine Ong Muslim is the author of The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other books of fiction and poetry. She has co-edited numerous anthologies of fiction, including Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories have been published in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese, Polish, and Serbian. She lives in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland town in southern Philippines.

Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III teaches courses on Southeast Asian literature and creative writing at the Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. He is the author of the novel Aklat ng mga Naiwan (Book of the Damned), coeditor of Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, and co-editor and co-translator of Wiji Thukul’s Balada ng Bala (The Ballad of a Bullet). His research and other creative works have been published in Likhaan, JONUS, Southeast Asian Studies, Talas, and Tomas.

__________________________________

From Glossolalia by Marlon Hacla, translated by Kristine Ong Muslim. Introduction by Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III. Copyright © 2023. Available from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Oh, I think they like me
with a brain freeze,

my sneeze summered into
sensations: showmanship.

Oh, I think they like
me down with the power
moves and painkillers,

circa my shoddy stint
as somebody’s son.

Direct deposits with my name
cursed along their backs

and mine along a muted seat
I paid good money for.
Oh, I think they like me with my

towering spine, my uneven
hips, my enamel as dark as the sense

of humor on my mother’s side.
I’d rather the route of washing

a mouth out with black soap,
than my father’s
slapping the black off me,

and I think they like me
like that: with the black off.

Oh, I think they like me in
a fugitive color—

indigo lake, carmine, or
rose madder. It gets
to me how these

fighting words warm
me with their blue

bias, warn me of my
stingy gestures

grandfathered in.
Lightfast after I lift
a mirror to my eye

level and spot a taper
as timid as tough love.

Oh, I think they
like me for it: my M.O.,

who I am when I am
laid off, my stunt double
and inside voice

careening about.

__________________________

From Tender Headed by Olatunde Osinaike. Poem reprinted with the permission of Akashic Books; copyright retained by Olatunde Osinaike. All rights reserved.

Zombies

Sex humblebrags involving
gardening: a neighbor’s
homegrown cukes huge
with thick rinds
left on my doorstep. Other
nature brags? Measuring
time in rocks, stone
rings, sediment, igneous;
eating your own
calendula & cornflowers
outside, as it gets dark.

When I don’t report on
others I report on myself.
That’s poetry.
I discover: all child-
hood is uncorrected
loneliness, epigenetic
anxiety, melancholia of
class. The directions are
to experience &
mourn, all at once.
On TV, this verity
represented by
zombies marching,
hidden in a barn.

Killing off secondary
characters with no notice
makes a work more minor.

Offing central characters
might make your work major.

See the loop of the
zombies, circling round.

If you are not going for
ecstatic experience
maybe you are
the Walking Dead.
Why there are ten
seasons of shows
and only four in Nature.

Featured photo by Taber Fisher.

[…]

Then my friend in Nablus had a dream.
The sun rose from the west

while he was praying
on a marble floor on fire.

Everyone was fleeing,
but he kept with his prayers,

felt only peace.
Then peace began to shake.
He was bound up in an iron cage

and tied to an animal
outside the cage. What animal?
It was no beast of burden.

And the beast yanked him
repeatedly into the bars
trying to get him out to no avail.

Did the animal want to free
my friend or eat him?
He wasn’t sure.

He was bloodied, bruised,
and it was November.
It was dawn, and time to pray.