the saddest part about survival is how often it is at the very end of things
that a rough road becomes a calm body of water
and there’s suddenly no need to look for knives. here’s another way of saying this:
there’s a special undocumented time the world becomes your mother.
a trail that ends wilderness. a stranger, bitter and concerned, saying
someone is following you and by now we know a hawkeyed jeopardy loses track
in a crowd. i remember few years ago 55 Filipinas were sold in Syria, bundled
off like goats. frightened and drained, who’d worn the same clothes for months,
youth-chewed faces the debris of a bombed heritage site. their hair trimmed
very short. their eyes the hours a ship sinks to the bottom. all day till midnight,
they cleaned the teeth of sharks, made a personal association with dirt
and lovelessness. and if they ate, they ate whatever was left.
easily, strong winds extinguished the light of candles in their head.
in a country report, they were likened to weeping willows
that will neither grow pendulous branches nor bear any colour other than resignation.
thanks to the moon for not dropping on us
when how many of us begged for the world to end already. thanks to the sun
for shadows—this means our backs are touching a wall.
how irreplaceable, the first morning that which is limping walks out of its animal
vellum and into a springing dusk, air mellow green.
the first night when fireflies quietly weave shrouds of light around
my chair and music is not crushed bones jangling inside you.
in the time of violence on this planet men cut trees down for gas, for more lands,
for another country—such contempt so irrational of those who will not be satisfied.
but i also saw a car who drove me to the nearest hospital when my partner turned
my right ear into a crevasse, ghastly, a well of blood, brimming.
friends who called my name when a machine breathed for me. lilies that stood nearby.
planes tired of trafficking brown people. willows extending their million arms
like neighbours who needed to see sunshine and smiles, food that won’t ever rot.
windows that lit in the darkest. tables that believed our story. winter blooming.
a full cup of thawed snow from a bird’s hands. things i’ll still see when i die.
“Gratefulness” will also appear in B.B.P. Hosmillo’s collection A Form of Torture, forthcoming from the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2026.