Category: Poetry

Phantoms in Mama’s Lungs

(as published on The Manila Times’ Sunday Times Magazine (Literary Life) on 26 January 2020)

Whenever I am away and a sharp longing
for Mother stabs at me, I will buy a stick
of cigarette, light it in the dark, and watch the embers
chew it up. Pa used to sigh her name, “Anita, hay Anita,”

and crack in loving jest that her mouth’s a tunnel
for steam locomotives, to which she would laugh
a response in hot clouds, in the ghosts of stillborn
thoughts she incinerated in her lungs.

Sometimes I wish she would tell me what
they whisper to her, instead of engraving them
as unreadable creases in the corners of her eyes.
Sometimes, the smell would jostle me between

wakefulness and sleep, her stun-gun chuckle
rumbling in my head. My senses clung onto her
and I hear scrawls of chalk against wall planks
for her abakada graffiti branded in my

five-year-old’s head (or were those forks on plates
when we only have shadows to eat?); I re-feel
the friction of linoleum on my skin as I grunt, crawling
out of a forced afternoon siesta (or were those creeping

days of numbness that I mistake for catnaps?); I relive teary
tug-of-wars at school gates, where I refuse to let go
of your long, leathery fingers. All that and a handful more—
my adult mind a child again, roiling in Past Tense

until, after I burn, in her nicotine hold, I will be home.

#

Note: I never thought this would ever see print. I remember keying these words onto my phone’s Notepad app late last year. I was away from home for some event I can no longer recall, caught a waft of a lit Philip Morris, and remembered Ma. It was my way of wrestling homesickness then, musings that I think would be best kept in my journal. The Sunday Times magazine Literary Editor Alvin I. Dacanay has my utter gratitude for believing that this is worthy to be shown to the world. I know you won’t be reading this, but thank you so much, Sir.

by airizcasta

Scarlet

(as published on The Philippines Graphic magazine)

akin to the shade that has incarnadined the bruises
of a lone oceanid choking at the rocks of Manila Bay—
she of soiled fingers combing through seaweed-tresses
matted with oil, excrement, with a balm of something
foreign, like a smear of leftover hope

or was it vermillion, the splash that punctuated
a cough of a barrel in an alley lit only
by the unblind eye of a gas lamp? Bespattered
little Totoy’s frail pallor until he is no longer
as white as the stones he did not know he carried

tantamount even to the carmine dark that dripped
from our fountain pens one November in the South,
ebbing, flooding headlines and *58 shallow
graves (32 of whom are of our brothers), drenching
the faded mourning clothes we still wear a decade later

a hue to drown out lazuli Rosco in our flag
to be one solid blood, crib of great men in the Song—
its notes we can still exhale audibly with our fallible
mouths; for as long as we are breathing
there are grieving and living for the aggrieved to be done

by airizcasta

Spacewoman

Her soul slipped into a spacesuit of patched-up hopes.
She looked into the vacuum and muttered,
“If light-years can be measured in teacups,
I’d be drinking my way up into the stars.”
But her dreams are nebulae, or even galaxies, away
and no amount of caffeine can bring her there.

Her heart nestled in a bed of sewn-together prayers.
She closed her eyes and whispered,
“If light-years can be measured in keystrokes,
I’d be writing my way up into the stars.”
But Words, no matter how strong,
may need more fuel from her to bring her there.

Her heart nestled in a bed of sewn-together prayers.
She closed her eyes and whispered,
“If light-years can be measured in keystrokes,
I’d be writing my way up into the stars.”
But Words, no matter how strong,
may need more fuel from her to bring her there.

Her tears were kept nowhere; they clouded her eyes.
She blinked them away and said,
“If light-years can be measured in saltwater,
would the nights I spent crying not be enough?”
The Universe went on spinning,
trying to ignore her despair.

Perhaps light-years can be measured
in how wide you can stretch
your heart’s threshold for pain;
in how many lash beatings
your soul can take
or in how many buckets of tears
you can keep at bay.

She knows she doesn’t know.
She’s more than a sightless Spacewalker
but the starshine from faraway, perhaps, is enough
for her to walk blindly, for a while…

by airizcasta