If you pull this card in diaspora, begin by giving thanks to Anagolay, Goddess of Lost Things, Ancestor of Wandering.
Say: Magandang umaga, magandang gabi, whether under sun or fog or atmospheric river: Salamat.
Remember you didn’t know how little you loved these mountains here before somebody told you they were also grown from lava: ring of fire kapwa to the island mountains where Siya and you (even if a mixie, monsoon on two sides) connect.
Now you can finally admit, these mountains would be beautiful if they weren’t your kapwa. Because they still would be: kapwa.
Send your mind to the edges of our origin, the blade of language holding us. With its incision. Beginning — no longer scraped away. Holding us even after the bone-clean of a meal, bowl-tilt and swipe. Say: I want that to be my name.
Now admit, loving Anagolay as you do: I doubt so much I sometimes feel like wrongness is my only “from.”
Each new re-puncturing, pain and threshold climbing toward surface.
Toward when, in another gender with another name, Siya watched
our bundoks climb and didn’t stop them.
Say portal, say tattoo. When you receive yours, the village your nanay is from already forgets your name.
Popsi, nko? Birthplace, na so.
You are inflected by all the grammars you’ve ever been surrounded by. You as in your body. As in you carry them, and they make you porous to more. You are all reverb.
Apologize to the mountains with the stain inside your voice.
Let the dance floor of it rise the string-tones of an open breeze.
When you hear somebody call for authentic, remember your style is so janky and collage that even your half steps have quarter notes in them: may every checkpoint except the ones that hold the land itself
turn into a disco ball. And loss
into a wave we surf rather than the oil we plunder. Noisiness in your heels at the troubled moss of intimate touch.
Let the touch not rancid. Hear me say it
in your ear.
Respond: May it not become my name.
Open toward when even the languages we’ve lost are where we’re from.
Now in real, remember: a dragon exoskeleton light in blue, flywheel on the railroad tracks: you were looking for Anagolay then. Thinking about the history of railroad here. Walking-balancing on one track with your eyes both closed.
If the card jokes you what that worship means you take a sip of sun.
Recall, a day of work when you had to thank every muscle, ligament, tendon, nerve, bone, joint, organ, inch of skin you could think of in the shower after. Just to get through the shower. Make this the practice of giving thanks every time you shower. Say: Land. Water. Strands. Hands. All are part of your name.
Here’s a story you can’t keep quiet — against the voice of your shame itself: when you strip songs
for the delicacy of where you haven’t been, you remain
what holds you.
There’s only love,
you’ve said that before, in the wake of your family’s loss.
By blood or chosen. You meant it
because for a little while your faith was not the body of a bee
curled up after sting. Your shame at its kindest says:
Regardless of my name: I am afraid to tell you
this: I, always will be.
Here, where there wasn’t a word, now there is. But it was also here
before you. In a language before language, and other ones as well. Between
two precipices. Waiting for the obstacle you are, to become more like a bridge.
“Wonder cuts the keys to doors between the worlds.”
To know you would never have written that if it wasn’t for our loss.
And also if the homie didn’t text you a freestyle that you tried to respond to, but your phone died. That line was all that remained.
Say this: I agree that who the poem waited for was not necessarily me. It’s better when Niki sings it. Eric loves her name.
When you pull the card, these are the conditions:
If mountains are the eyes that make the clouds relax their steps.
If what it takes for mountain-form to be.
If angled off the slightest, this alley at its crouch.
If crow-sex made this valley into city first.
If car-storm breaks, coyotes trot. If bloom
gives way to leaf-turn, fall, whose after-falling purpose (of return) is finally
un-prevented by your hands again this year.
The circles of us widen, even in loss: kapwa.
Kapwa: you must find a branch in water and bring it to speak with the markings on a cedar.
You must give the branch the name of your demon.
Find a tune by Prince dancing in your head, make up a song with the demon’s name
(do not share the first lines here, do not share their name):
Hopscotch and dream smoke. Trouble-cause and flam.
Even when he’s on the run he’s never on the lam.
Searching for the rhythm in a phrase makes you forget. Good. What was next was almost quietness. Free of any names.
The card doesn’t mean to say that you’re not whole (maybe no one is, at least while alive). Only that the image you hold is more like a hologram than a colouring book. Those holograms at the mall in ’95 when the food court had ash trays and you thought that getting discounts on fries was halfway to a date.
Let’s not get into cricket bats, that’s another card. With the pager code for carloads to show up: inflection. Distraction: Hey, check out this pretty running wall, these birds that cross to the island in the ferry’s airstream wake.
This is more like it: the stutter working river step, the fast-food auntie mentoring a grown-ass child she calls anak, tobacco in its spoken form, the price of smoke-packs at Fraser laundromats. Those types of names.
A city, flayed, can migrate, too: do you believe that now? The closer you look, the less the land seems to move, not unlike a name.
It’s clear you want to ask: If I make an incantation of loss, is it still an incantation. You want that, careful, to be your name.
Say this: May I write what I’m calling in. With the ashes I release.
Believe: If anyone finds the word that says: “the last migration of touch before departure” — I understand Anagolay will choose them instead of me.
Good, now the card can tell you: Curiosity, like love, is older than doubt. Put that in your name.
In shapeshift is the residue of each previous shape, like the residue of volcano in the island-sand, labyrinth lines of loss, you say, and the card believes you.
Still, you want to lie and say
the blade of language is a shell, and the shell whistling in the sand is a whistle I can hear.
Do not. Instead, invite the land a little closer, as the oceans do.
Because the land is more beautiful
than long-distance phone calls that make us
more beautiful than we are. And loud.
Now loud: Ingat!
With the g dropping like the word dropping, aaaaaah sound elongated. Good.
Even when your pantry shames from running out of rice: Restoration in the everyday.
If you can, to give Anagolay that, more than just your name.
You must find the cord between you and the rock that calls the phosphorescence, the night of sky and every city light that shuts to give these evergreens their full silhouette of moon. You must not believe that you can ever belong, only that you are here to be with your longing.
When you are, you will quit asking the card to tell you who this is: the one who crosses dimensions, whose bangka is a weather-beaten teeth-grit where the branches crack a smile.
Waves cross over your head from them, engulfing.
It’s up to you — Bahala Na — to hold onto Their name.