2 POEMS
Ina Cariño
I SING DESPITE THE TENDER STENCH OUTSIDE
| anthems tells me more than the throbbing of this country, & when only my shadow listens, I carry this curtain of hair warbling. my slow step's quaver loping speed—crawling— scampering. turned inside-out, my inhale stops short— a more capable machine, lit up on screens. money feigns, will wring music bitter taut. |
my waking life: tempo charred by bigotry. lick sand from my lips. from one hill to another, still catching up— toward replicated homes, a necessity. what is an anthem in crisis. I breathe, a dusty concertina— interpret sweat as if it were a farewell wheeze— a ratty flag: elegies fail. |
dirges for sister-flocks darker than. my freckles mimic my mother's elbows, brown awls, jostled kneecaps. I am a child, but a love song in dreams. the wrong listeners hear a film burn, negatives not an option. the old guard will make even crumbs nourish. |
__
MY BODY A RETELLING
of emptiness (never)
with/
/out hunger
doubled over bent jackknife
false gods would
(don't) let me die
search
for crumbs of home:
maps
snapped rosaries
cobwebbed
jasmine
my uncle's
scratch-
tin bones
when I worry my ear
against
my daughter's palms
I can hear
an ancestor humming
burnished anthems t(here)
is a mountain
outside my window
til I remember I'm on the other
side of the world
my tongue
phantoms amid pale throngs
my mouth refuses
an outpouring of starlings somewhere
a flag still glitters
(never) this country
renamed me mirror
history refracts
endless
I shirk at my hide
its reflection
nights
look for
the hidden
colonizer
perhaps you've met them
perhaps you harbor them
perhaps it is you
__
"I Sing Despite the Tender Stench Outside": This poem started as a small group workshop/exercise in which every person oriented themselves to the direction in which they were born while writing. I am located in North Carolina and was born in the Philippines, so in my case, I faced east, which seemed most appropriate given that I crossed the Atlantic Ocean when I immigrated to the US.
"my body a retelling": I often write with motifs of food and hunger in mind, as I associate home and familial ties with being nourished—or, in the opposite sense, the lack of home/familial ties with hunger. I explore intergenerational nourishment amidst trauma and displacement + diaspora in a lot of my work, and this was another manifestation of that.