My sister in navigation, from another migration, lights up a childhood story,
passes me a drag. That’s when Lolo’s ghost appears — to take one also. Ripples
in this working river at the pier below us, and I tell the one about the nail clipper
interviewing Nanay for a job. Picture the clippings. The man in the suit
allowing them to fall, discarded moons instead of questions.
That was already over here, and I already existed, but before I started to haunt
whatever Lolo pictured to keep his feet moving. In April’s warming rain
as he Death-Marched from Bataan. Years before my future nanay shimmered
into view. The log ripples subside. Too many rivers, their memory also
just for them, have watched somebody’s lolo scour a rock — or turning
rooster vane — for signs of coming blood. My sis knows all too well
when body isn’t sign of love, when it doesn’t mean worth grieving.
This is for the ground that pushed up at his feet and hers, that pushed our nanays
into another haunting; elsewhere from those islands; those islands
whose roots are centipedes of flame.
This, for cardboard boxes on weigh-scales at airports troubling the sepia rhyme
with nostalgia. Lies we forge begin us again from paleness at the mouth of sleep
(nothing gets passed down through generations like silence).
If I didn’t raise my cup in this story, help me raise it now. Cheers
any moment that brings back the heckle of Lolo’s cough. The bacon oil
hop-burn, at my forearm from before my sister’s telling. Thanks be
to this joy that haunts like a raft undone, to tunnels we leave
each other in our stories. Between us, the smoke
improvises its own lineage. Lolo, do you see? I also have a sister you never
got to meet. When she sings, I hear the lullaby’s rev
the Death March failed to take from you. I see your body walking
on any day but that and getting up to walk on that day, too.
My sister, you would recognize anting-anting in her: the engine
of her work: a hunger that turns a spoon into a hand: your hand
at my mouth: feeding me something your words can’t,
keeping me from biting my tongue.
*For & After Cynthia Dewi Oka