My “Third World” tongue is learned in wars. Putang ina,
gago, and tarantado taste sweet and buttery like mango,
our national fruit hard-labored by underpaid farmers
in hacienda – a broken scale inherited from encomenderos.
From their leathery hands, I learn bayanihan. In my country,
we pour hospitality into each others’ containers that conquistadores
dehydrated. I rebel against the bestial Padre Damaso who disrobed our land
by making love not like the Maria Clara he groomed but an impertinent Urduja.
After fucking, I would wash smeared linens with Philippine detergent –
a small attempt to unshackle from 400-year-long imprints left by
the Deweys and Magellans — the great White patriarchs
who redacted our matriarchs from history books before leaving us in shambles.
Their vanilla skin I torch by overstaying in the sun. I wear kayumanggi
on my shoulders as whiteners enslaving supermarket shelves scramble to erase it
from memory. I will not scrub our datu, bayog, Bathala, and babaylan off me.
I write en Español; in English to show these messiahs,
los falsos mesías, that these “Flipino monkeys”/indios
can coax the waves of their language in ways
that their unbent tongues cannot
row in the vernacular ocean of my people.
(sus lenguas sin doblar no pueden remar en el oceano vernáculo de mi pueblo.)
This was first published in San Anselmo Press’ chapbook, Memory and Freedom, published in November 2023.
