Category: Poetry

post-interview poem or what i wrote after reading the news

hear me out   please             my home  has grown into  gunfire

the bullet is going round again on the news      my people dangle

between  nightmares    between  mouthfuls  of regrets   in search

of quiet     in another headline   a child left home for school  and

returned to his parents wiped into nothingness    as if by the hand of

God    & the community remained quiet like an explosive at rest  

on reading  the news  i misplace my tongue   i do not know where

to start mourning this country of ghosts this cemetery    three

shadows short to be called a night    so i begin from my mother’s

waist tie where she wraps our family ruin into safety

i begin from the news where an entire generation was burnt into ashes

& the ashes  burnt into ashes   & the ashes into the ashes of burnt things

i begin from my street that has now become a Qibla where the kunfayakun

of bullets manifest                i begin with my bare shadow    mourning alongside me

i begin from the  voices of the Chibok girls in interviews when asked how it

feels to be home again     from their accents       i can tell the number of times they wish

to break alongside the night        i feel the loneliness in their voices

the void wearing their faces like skins      the therapy they will not get

i know what it means to be plucked unripe two winters away from

blossoming      hear me out please    my country has grown into gunfire

earlier today    a fight broke between students and some gangsters

and the police     a few meters away    feigned silence    like God

Point Wolf

WOLF POINT4

The Lewis and Clark Expedition passed by here, westward bound, in May 1805. Fur trappers and traders followed them a few years later. Steamboats began making it from St. Louis up the Missouri as far as Fort Benton in the early 1860s. Wolf Point was the halfway point between Bismarck and Fort Benton. Wood choppers supplied cord wood for boats stopping to refuel. The American Fur Company packet Chippewa blew up and sank not far from here in 1861. A deck hand tapped a barrel of alcohol by candle light. The fumes, the candle and the 25 kegs of black powder did the rest. Fortunately, no lives were lost in the disaster.

Wolf Point originated as a sub-agency and trading post for the Fort Peck Reservation in 1879. The place was named when trappers killed several hundred wolves one winter and stacked their frozen carcasses next to the river, where they were observed by men heading upriver on a steamboat. The name Wolf Point stuck and no one there has been bothered by a wolf at the door since then.

 

POINT WOLF

Several hundred wolves traded songs one winter, harmonizing upriver under frozen black fumes. The river was a halfway point between men and lives lost, steamboats stacked like carcasses upon each other. The 25 remaining fur trappers and traders followed the wolves to a place named woods, for that is what they were and there was no bother to name things anymore. The men carried candles in their hands to refuel the fires the wolves had kept burning for them. Lewis and Clark slicked like strange words on their tongues, when the wolves asked for the sub-agency responsible for the westward disaster. The trappers stuck out their palms for the wolves to lick the keg powder off. No one returned to the Company. No one supplied the Fort. Fortunately, the river stuck its course and soon the whole Point traded light for depth. The wolves barreled around the last standing door, observing the original agreement to which they were bound to sing the early years backwards. The men sunk to their knees and no one has bothered the wolves since then.

4. Text of a historical marker erected at Wolf Point, Roosevelt County, Montana by the Montana Department of Transportation

The Hot Spring Post-Pinkerton

PINKERTON HOT SPRINGS5

Even though this land was Ute territory, the upper Animas River Valley was first settled by prospectors in the spring of 1860. Charles Baker, returning from the mines north of Silverton, established “Old Animas City” and built the first bridge across the Animas River. The community lasted less than a year before it was abandoned. During the summer of 1875, James Harvey Pinkerton settled in the area now known as Pinkerton Hot Springs. He raised dairy cows with his wife, three sons, and four daughters. Throughout the year they produced and sold dairy products in mining camps in the San Juan Mountains. In the spring of 1876 they sold 116 pounds of butter for a dollar a pound to the miners north of Silverton.

 

THE HOT SPRING POST-PINKERTON

Even though, the community abandoned the land. Even though, the cows and prospectors produced and sold the mountains. Even though, Charles Baker lasted less than a summer in the Valley and produced no wife. Even though, the butter fattened the sons on all the miners’ daughters. Even though a dollar couldn’t settle the spring and the area known as the River of lost mining camps pounded the bridge until it broke and fell through. Even though, Pinkerton took his wife and his 116 cows to the fat river and drowned. Even though, the north blew in 1876 snowstorms and blew out 1875 hot summers. Even though, the community abandoned the land and abandoned the land and abandoned the land. Even though, this territory was first and now Ute land. Even now, this old, old land. Even now.

5. Text of a historical marker erected near Durango in La Plata County, Colorado by the Colorado Department of Transportation—San Juan Skyway

Reap the Rules
(𒀭𒉿𒉌𒄀𒅕 𒆪𒌌𒆷𒀝)

The glass in my veins

still remembers white sand.

Gold-stopped, the head of Crassus

lolls beneath the raft of the filling station,

a reliquary of fossil greed.

The glass in my veins

still remembers white sand.

Gold-stopped, the head of Crassus

lolls beneath the raft of the filling station,

a reliquary of fossil greed.

Lady whose name I cannot translate,

of heavens and chariot wheels

rolling out the signature of war,

give me enough to see this hunting’s end:

the unhorsed king, the lion at his throat.

I have drunk so long from this bowl of pomegranates,

dry and bloodied as a broken heart.

The rod flowered and its petals were flames.

Once, I returned Tulip, Once I became

once the city sprouted with gods—

seeds whispers, freshly braided with the breaths of the

ancients; tombs cracked impulses like

husks and roots curled from the bones of history. say

once, children built homes in the ribs of

cedars. their colours of laughter carved into a country

bark. once, elders named their dreams

after a tree. for trees do not forget the orders of a lively

hope. once, all things were bright and

beautiful. and eternity was hymnary into the greens of

a monsoon wind. but when the axe is

hungry, ferns unfurl singing dirges to the fractal geo-

metries of empires. only the deeds of

mycelium remembers the threads of hunger in which

she has entertained. does the forest

shrink into memories, if not that the city has lichen a

little normal into ingratitude? take the

crack walls of sycamore and build these heartbreaks

no more, this part where the rain out-

lives the wildness of fire and war. softly, softly the

mercy in the vine would blood over

us. and the borders of dust would come rhythm with

the original poem of god. down the

swollen belly of the earth, the acacia would fold its

leaves like a clasped hand, awaiting

the unction of redemption. the rain would play the

field of angels and the patient hand

would hold a miracle to her pomaces. back to the

prayers that tasted like gunpowder,

locking me like a decked heaven. but the truth is,

I’ve hurt myself gauzing kindness

out of the neon mouths of an open field. the sight

of me in tender hands of bulrushes.

Gratefulness

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.

In the Video: A Woman with Her Newborn [Content Warning]

Why don’t these people stop having babies

during a war, under the air strike?

—A comment under the video

 

 

In other words, why don’t they

stand at their windows,

watch the offerings of fire

falling from the sky,

Why don’t these people stop having babies

during a war, under the air strike?

—A comment under the video

 

 

In other words, why don’t they

stand at their windows,

watch the offerings of fire

falling from the sky,

listen to their own bones

shiver at every explosion, wait

for their flesh

to turn into ash?

 

I am not there       but the memory of a war

is saved somewhere

in my childhood bones

If I have to live through another one,

if a shell is to fall on my home

I want to be in the kitchen

 

watching the butter

melting in the pan,

my grandma massaging the dough.

I want to be smelling the thyme,

the tarragon, choosing

which one to add to the dish we are cooking

 

I want to be in the bedroom

lying beside the warm body

of my lover, listening to the rhythm

of his blood, still flowing

within the borders

of his body

 

I want to be bathing

my newborn, pouring water

on her feet, feeling

her smooth unmarred skin

This is not a love poem

As I walk past the sex store downtown, I think

of flags, how the zealots strap them on and

screw us. I am not interested in the fire

 

of your want, unless you want to stop

this world from burning, unless you want

to topple the men from their mountains

 

of heads, their slot machine eyes spinning and

spinning and spinning. No, this is not a love

poem. I will not crawl through the trenches

 

of your longing. You can sob all you want,

and still, the icebergs cry harder. No one

ever told them that sadness makes you

 

disappear. The truth is, I simply couldn’t

do it. How could I write about love at a time

like this? But I guess, I did love the idea

 

of us, once. A daring species. A people made

of poetry. The way I used to run after stray

kindness. My delight when I reached out

 

to compassion, and felt it grab me back. The time

a stranger held my hand at a department store,

enclosing my fingers in hers like they were tiny

 

tender petals. Or when we all lay on the ground,

six of us, like landed seals, trying to coax that

cat from out beneath the streetcar. How funny

 

is this life, that once the cat was rescued, we

all stood up, dusted snow from our coats and

continued on our way.

Nightmare

I wanted to throw my arms around the thick white neck of my brother’s polar bear and cry I’m glad that you are safe from the endless water. I wanted it to nose me, too. I wanted my palm against the fur, and the warm skin beneath. I wanted to see our bones. I wanted to know they were strong. I wanted to be unafraid of being swallowed—by the bear, or the blue night, or the holes in the weft of the world. I wanted the water to move. I wanted lapping. I wanted to hear bees in the arctic quiet. I wanted wolves. I wanted anything but that cerulean muteness, pressing and pressing. I wanted to make noise. To produce birdsong. I wanted a heart-red cardinal to fly from my throat, screaming. I wanted to keep my brother in my hands. I wanted the bear to soften and curl into the snow. I wanted slumber. I wanted my brother to sprawl on the back of his bear and point to the constellations. I wanted them to stay. I wanted to not be suddenly alone in the silent twilight that was all that was left of the world. I wanted to chase them over the crest of the pale blue hill. I wanted to be untroubled. I wanted to gather their footprints and hold them, weeping. I wanted my chest to feel unbruised.