Freedom from Loss
We are the sufferers who suffer for natural love of man for another man, who commemorate the humanities of every man. We are the creators of abundance.
— Carlos Bulosan
i
When Miguel and I
First discovered each other
At the age of 9,
I knew I would never
Be the same. Together,
Our bodies are golden.
A boy is a boy because
He is made of water.
Miguel tells me he is
Born out of yeast.
And then, quarried from
That cold darkness,
He transforms into a bottle
Of glass. I watch my mother
Pick Miguel up and
Swallow him down.
i
In an alternate reality, my suicide attempt is successful. I am undressed for the autopsy the way you prepare to lose your virginity. External examinations reveal that my body is teeming with cities and crowded tenements, violent factories and hands denied of purpose. I wanted to feel needed, so I died. I wanted to feel needed, so I moved to New York.
i
In this version, I am no longer the moon,
Bloated with blue light. We take democracy for granted.
Back home, you’d get electrocuted for living like this.
Extrajudicized for 100 years. Freedom is a fantasy.
In America, God is the government. Here, I am also free
To be killed, but at least I can speak my mind.
I gather beneath the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs,
Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime
He did not commit. But at least I’ve been spared
From tyranny. Remember, my faith is a living thing,
It can be crippled and bruised. God becomes a jasmine
Becomes a cradle becomes the fruit
Of my sweetest labor.
i
Sa likod mo! I shriek at Rissy, and water breaks upon our raft like glass. For a moment, we are completely deluged by shards of liquid starlight. All I can make of Rissy is their crumbling hair and eyes the color of nectar. I would know. Unless want is completely annihilated, even honeybees are denied their freedom. I wipe my face and look behind us. Miles along the Yakima, fires are still visible from the valley. Out of desperation, I burn my poetry books to keep us warm. It does not matter. You cannot be creative if you have nothing to eat, no time or ability to read and discuss things. You cannot be creative if you are merely alive. Below us, Miguel clinks in his bottle like windchimes.
i
In this version, I’ve loved Rissy all day.
Our home is whittled at the wedges,
Dogs yapping, sweaty sun. Tiredness,
Like a blister, is a mere fretting,
And we have not yet searched the land
For something to hold.
We are no longer shackled to the agriculture
Of faithfulness — or rather,
We are no longer barred from enjoying
Our own produce. In this version,
None of us are robbed. Rissy produces a song.
I produce a poem.
My mother produces an addiction.
The curtain falls, and my love
Becomes an orchard: a multitude of choice,
Bereft of all desire.
i
My people wanted to feel needed, so we became factory hands,
Field hands, mill hands. We became doctors and nurses
And helpers. We became soldiers in exchange for respect.
Liberty always comes with a price. For my mother,
This meant death. For me, this meant loneliness.
We’re good at our jobs, even if no one thanks us.
We are a flowering race, even if we are conceived
From the ashes of our deceased.
i
In the present, my sister calls. I tell her I’m returning to therapy.
A boy is a boy because he is made of water. I wanted to feel needed,
So I fell in love.
But being in love is the same as being exiled.
i
In an alternate reality, my mother’s addiction does not kill her.
We both know about the taxonomies of grief
In this anti-totalitarian state. Freedom is only valorized
If your captors say so. I sprint to my apartment,
Hysterical with want, and pour freezing bottles of Miguel
Into my bathtub. The amber liquid glistens like starlight.
Or is it diesel? I still smell Yakima on my clothes.
I dive into my best friend and weep with joy.
Or is it urine? My faith is a democracy.
I say a prayer and strike a match.
God listens:
I’m engulfed by flames.
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This poem borrows, alters, or references text from the following sources:
“Freedom From Want” by Carlos Bulosan
“Valorizing racial boundaries: Hegemony and conflict in the racialization of Filipino migrant labour in the United States” by Rick Baldoz
“The Tracks of Babylon” and “Mid-Morning for Sheba” by Edith L. Tiempo
Moonrise at Avenue H
after Noreen Ocampo
Let’s kill the streetlights.
Tonight, you’re the only guide
I need. You, who shrieks habibi
Every Thursday afternoon. You,
With the apple sauce in your hair.
Brooklyn is sweeter thanks to you.
Tonight, we meet our darling who
Took his pen and drew to life the stars.
We board the Q train without
Any destination in mind.
Venus, bless our trajectory.
Tonight, we want nothing but Mustafa,
Idrees, the gay bar, seventeen trees,
Your pink body across my face.
Venus, we’re coming for you.
Help us spin laughter out of darkness.
I’m Not Myself Right Now
Used to be a fatty. So I slivered myself into nothing. Like almonds. Or moonlight. Then my mom
collapsed in the shower. So the doctors prescribed me meds that blew me up.
Again.
So I became the crazy fatty with a dead mom.
So I moved to New York and lost the weight. But not the motherlessness. That follows you
everywhere. It exists in what do your parents do? and I ♡ MOM mugs and the $15
daffodils off Avenue I.
The word for flower in Tagalog is bulaklak. It shares a prefix with the word bulok, meaning
rotten.
Before raping my city, the IJA decapitated over 100 civilians at Dy-Pac Lumberyard. Their heads
were dumped in a field less than three miles from the presidential palace, where they later
blossomed into strawberries in the summertime.
People treat you differently when you’re pretty. But that’s the thing, I’ve been pretending this
whole time.
Josefina’s pregnant now. Accidentally. It’s ironic, given she’s wanted to die since seventh grade.
That makes two of us.
She’s asked me to be ninong. Gender reveal parties at 22, I thought only white missionaries
pulled that trick.
I’m so sorry for leaving you on read. Again. Everything’s so noisy, I can’t escape it. But I miss
you. How’d the body scan go? Are you back to singing?
I work at the college radio station now, thanks to Kaylin. I’m like Papa Jack, except I’m never
on air. It’s the same with therapy, I have so much to say but never the right words.
We ambush the liquor store during Passover. Get handsy with strangers in Bushwick. This girl’s
elevator opens directly into her living room. Wtf. But these aren’t my real friends. It’s the
same with mom, I’m never here anymore.
I spent years chasing her shadow, even before the aneurysm.
America is realer than I am. Her troops incinerated my city while defending us from Imperial
forces. They later established permanent military posts on these very same flower beds,
made fertile with the ashes of our irretrievable history.
Is there any evidence we were even here?
Filipinos are gorgeous, so by default we are transient. The word for brief in Tagalog is saglit. It
shares a suffix with the word ulit, meaning repeat.
My people are a recurring brevity.
I can’t hear you, I’m sorry. I saw my shrink after ghosting her two years ago. I’m back on my
happy pills, that’s what’s up.
Call me back. Please. I miss your voice, even if it’s scratchy.
A week before Mother’s Day, Kaylin takes me to Target. I’m hungering for things which no
name exists, and I’m staring at her the way pregnant bellies stare at bayonets, but I need
to choke the feeling down. There’s so much I want to tell her — my family inebriation
and the significance of World Thyroid Day, how a city on the equator can still appear as
white as snow.
But then I see the greeting cards, and she’s lost me.
So I’m lying in bed and seeing stars. Watching the shadow of my chest stutter and fall.
Like children screaming in laughter, tripping before exploding into strawberries.
UNCLE SUGAR
The morning they ignite your house / I collapse the way artists do on Channel 7 / I wake up two years later / on the kitchen floor / facedown in a pool of Sarsi / and shred your old prison letters using my teeth / I beg God to smite me / if no one lets me live here anyway / the hours stretch / into seawater / while the moon unravels / above us / like an ulcer / inside the cheek / the girl who kissed me / dizzy at the bus stop / said my lips reeked / of driftwood / and diesel / and machete / my bed is no longer safe / in my dreams / the dead return / while asleep / I’m still running / and running / my mother’s remains were buried in the closet / and your daughter rolls / the policeman’s dick / in her mouth / like it’s a revolver / back home / we compare love to a massacre / this rot lives / inside us all / I brought it with me accidentally / through cardboard boxes / and multivitamin containers / and smile-sized scratches inside my wrists / the receiver on the countertop sputters / like flame to the back / of a spoon / kayo ang biktima / puntahan niyo ang bahay / buhusan niyo ng gasolina / sigaan ninyo / cut to post-roll / toothpaste jingle / radiowaves disintegrating / into ‘72 all over again / the hissing / yet another pistol / swinging overhead / farmers falling / one by one / their innards feeding the reeds / is it true / the inmates of New Bilibid / resembled an overcrowded jaw / your cellmate’s face / so close / to yours / even the half-hearted hymns / drifting through the barred window / seemed farther away / I am pregnant with the loneliness / of a strange country / longing for a home / I will never belong to / last week at the supermarket / I was greeted by a man / in our native tongue / he said he’s been missing me / even if we’ve never met / in my apartment / I cried for days / I plucked thrice-bruised fruit from the basket / and broke it using my teeth / even then / shivering in the pool of my dining room floor / drenched in rotten juice / and month-old pulp / I was still convinced / there was something left to save
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The GMA Network, informally known as Channel 7, is a popular Filipino broadcast organization.
Sarsi is a Filipino brand of sarsaparilla.
“Kayo ang biktima. Puntahan niyo ang bahay, buhusan niyo ng gasolina, sigaan ninyo. [You’re the victims. Go to their houses, douse them in gasoline, and set them alight.]” are actual words spoken by then-chief of the Philippine National Police, Ronaldo “Bato” dela Rosa, urging former drug users to kill local drug lords.
The New Bilibid Prison is the main penitentiary of Manila, infamous for overcrowding and gang wars.
Poem in Which Our Men Still Belong to Us, or Jennelyn Olaires as Madonna della Pietà
Just say the word, and the bleach will drain itself from the icon of Jesus on the jeepney door. Blood rushing backwards, puncture wounds sealing shut, faces shrinking into rosebuds. Until all that’s left is Holiday Inn and the bastard child. Our bodies are temples of worship but we will chop off the hands of anyone who touches our sisters without consent. Love brought Lazarus back to life. This is how I met my beloved, in the morgue, martyred by four gunshots to the chest. He was twice my age and reeked distinctly of Tanduay Ice. Beside us, his best friend lay face-down with a silver knife in his back. What, this silly thing? He said. Don’t worry about it, hijo. You heard the man. Rehab pamphlet, PAGASA Signal 5, uncle dearest, brown boy suicide, who cares? At the table, we say grace for dinner, and I moan at the emptiness where my father used to sit.
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Jennelyn Olaires became the subject of a media frenzy in 2016 after being photographed cradling the body of her husband Michael Siaron, who was shot dead for being a “drug pusher.” Commentators compared the image to the sculpture Madonna della Pietà by Michelangelo.
According to the Book of John, Jesus Christ resurrected his friend Lazarus four days after his entombment.
Tanduay Ice is a type of alcoholic drink in the Philippines.
Hijo means “son” or “young boy” in Spanish.
The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) has a five-tier rating system for tropical cyclones, with wind signal five (“super typhoon”) being the strongest at 185 km/h or higher.
Marginalia: Micro-Essays on Memory, Exile, and Space
Oh, anak! My shining star! You know how much I love you. I’d do anything. You, with the leaves in your hair. My little poet. Don’t tell anyone. I’d kill myself if you leave. You’ll become a para-alcoholic. You’ll take on the characteristics of my disease, even if you never pick up the drink.¹ Please. You know how much I love you. You know
I still hear the frogs, the crickets, the birds and night critters.
It’s like
they make up
the air mattress I breathe in.²
Addiction is a family disease.¹
In America, I have no family.
Here, the Western imperialist identity integrated itself first (“my root is the strongest”) and thus conveyed itself as a value (“a person’s worth is determined by his root”). The conquered people are then forced to search for an identity that deteriorates in opposition to the Other. This is the crux of Rhizomatic theory, or “the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”³
Calla lilies are rhizomatous. Calla lilies were at my mother’s funeral. Calla lilies are wherever I go. Where else could I go? I became depressed. I became / worldless.⁴
It returns to me in frag me n t s. Sweaty lips,
a whisper of Maybelline. Floral skirt, bunched up at the thigh,
calla lilies
crushed
between hands. Callused hands.
Boot paint and tobacco. My mother’s tongue, unfurling into a filmstrip,
orbiting the whites of my eyes.
The neighbors and I sit in a sweaty circle, clotheslines whipping around us. The air reeks of garbage and ash. Amidst the squabbling of my grandfather’s roosters, one of them reaches over to caress my hair. Santo Niño, she calls me, her teeth broken like seashells. Amerikano, gorgeous curls. Except this doesn’t make sense because I’m not American and my country idolizes me more than it loves me and Jesus was never white in the first place and
From this imperialist origin flourishes an entire body of literature surrounding the concept of hybridity. Devised by Homi Bhabha, hybridity “means to locate interstices between different cultural subjectivities to study the effects of imperialism on identity, culture, and society.” The exchange between “you” and “I” (or the self and Other) creates an ambivalent “third space,” where hybridity thrives.⁵
When you breathe in,
you capture the spirit
of things.
Did you know that?²
I’m breathing my people but it makes me dizzy. Jozé Rizal was mestizo, too. His parents adopted additional Spanish surnames under the decree of Governor-General Narciso Clavería, and he spent his life largely rejecting his own heritage.⁶ I could rename myself but you’d still remember me this way, sleeping whenever my legs gave out. Grassy field, blank space.⁴ There are
no borders here.
When my mother died, the world lost meaning. What was left to breathe? To be foreign is to be entombed. America is simply the afterlife. In my memory are lagoons. Wounded lagoons. They are covered with death’s-heads, not calla lilies. People here couldn’t pin my country on a map. Do we exist if no one observes us? We are island scars of water. These islands, dynamited by alcohol.⁷ All this fire!
So much burning, I don’t know how to explain it.²
Rizal hid his final poem, “Mi último adiós,” inside an alcohol stove shortly before his execution.⁸
It’s been so long now, the images are b r oke n inside me.
At some point, I was there. I was
everything.
My mother’s vomit, the razor blade against my skin.²
Liquid sun of rums⁷, pouring through the sky of my throat.
At some point,
I remembered.
I was the only person pulled out of line after arriving in New York. I spent four years inside the immigration office and woke up one day in a stranger’s bed. Aren’t you glad to have houses now? she asked, kissing the petal of my ear. Don’t worry about a thing, love, you are of superior intelligence! You will never relapse into ordinary native life.⁹
It goes without saying that the binary system encircling this third space has historically been preserved through violence. By comparison, while the rhizome is an “enmeshed root system,” the manner in which the network spreads lets no “predatory rootstock [take] over permanently.” This is in direct opposition to the totalitarian root of colonialism.³
No one can love me, not while I’m diseased. I want to settle down, but the law of settled life depends on its intolerant Root.³ I’m regurgitating all this in class when my professor bursts, It’s not enough, it’s not enough! The United States can’t beat down armed resistance. A huge army must be maintained to keep the natives down.⁹
That night, I call my sister in tears:
I’ve been searching for so long, but the only thing
I found was the dirty end of the world.⁷
How could mom do this to us?
I can’t breathe,
I can’t breathe.
Exile is still movement,
Even if it’s self-imposed.
It doesn't matter.
I’m forgetting mom.
I’m f org et t in g everything.
The roads, the trees, the house on the hill.
How she seized us, how she begged,
Please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please don’t leave, please
Go back to sleep, kuya, my sister says. For me.
In the postcolonial system, the conquering person’s Root is consolidated as strongest, and of more value than the conquered. Through a “denaturing process,” the colonized person is quested after an identity that opposes the procedure of identification as initiated by the invader. “The sacred — but henceforth unspeakable — enigma of the root’s location” embodies a thrilling moment in the Poetics of Relation.³ The ambivalence of one’s root is holy in its subjectivity.
My third space is liminal. Stairwell into nothing, lotto booth with no vendor. Best Western off Newark. International missionary school, drainless channel for all the water of the world.⁷ My mother’s dead body, bloated with cheap liquor. Here, I confuse love with pity. Here, I have sick needs.¹
My professor was right about one thing: we shall belong to America by right of conquest. My ungrateful people, striking the first blow. How we reciprocated their kindness with cruelty, their mercy with Mausers. We’re no different than Louisiana, by purchase, or Texas, or Alaska. Save us from ourselves!⁹
Can I tell you something? For a long time,
I was afraid
of being unable to finish
this poem.² Addiction is unique, a stock
taking all upon itself and killing
everything around it.
Colonialism becomes an addiction.
Addiction becomes a rhizome.
The relation is tragic.³
All these years, all these years.
Oh, anak, where have you been?
… Running away, I guess.²
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¹Tony, A. (1978). Laundry List. Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families. https://adultchildren.org/literature/laundry-list/.
²Dubourg, I. (2023, February 7). The Memories I Ran From Found Me. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/opinion/cuba-the-missing-parts.html.
³Glissant, E. (1997). Poetics of Relation. (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1990).
⁴Cohen-Vera, B. (2022). The World. Shenandoah. https://shenandoahliterary.org/712/the-world/.
⁵Banisalamah, A. (2020). Colonialism, Sexualities, and Culture: A Transnational Interrogation of Caribbean Subjectivities. Papers on Language & Literature, 56(2), 167-197. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
⁶Bondoc, J. (2017, October 10). A reader’s query about ‘alias Rizal’. The Philippine Star. https://www.philstar.com/opinion/2017/10/10/1747570/readers-query-about-alias-rizal.
⁷Césaire, A. (2001). Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. (C. Eshleman & A. Smith, Trans.) Wesleyan University Press. (Original work published 1939).
⁸Andrade, P., Jr. (2015, December 31). Rizal’s alcohol lamp was actually a stove. Philippine Daily Inquirer. https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/218103/rizals-alcohol-lamp-was-actually-a-stove/.
⁹Sawyer, F. H. (1900). The Inhabitants of the Philippines. Sampson Low, Marston & Company.
