I.

Sa pangatlong gabi ng ating kainan, 
ibinukod natin ang sarili sa harap ng isa’t isa.
 
Ang silid mo tapat ng silid ko,
at sa pagitan ay bilin ng dalisay
na tig-isang bahilya: 

tanawin natin ang bakod
ng ating sikmura.
Diyan ko lamang matatagpuan
ang tunay na papawi sa uhaw
na banaag sa aking hungkag na baso.   


II.

Kahit ang kusina nila’y silid din tulad ng 
katawan. 

Pilit mang ihiwalay sa lunan ng hapagkainan
upang madaling malunok ang 
napapangalanang lasa, lambot, tigas, 
at kulay,

umaalingasaw pa rin ang lansa ng hilaw na
lunggating tinanggal ang laman-loob bago maihain 
sa puting mantel sa harap ng iba, 

ang alimuom ng nanigas na mga kalamnang
maghapong tinutunaw sa init ng sariling dugo, 

na matapos man iluto at timplahan, 
tatagas pa rin kahit sa konting 
pagbaon ng kutsilyo natin.

Maglalawa sa pinggan, sa akin at sa iyo, 
magpapaalala sa serbilyeta, sa kuwelyo, 
mauuwi sa tagong lupi sa palda at 

kahit salamin natin ang isa’t isa,
‘di maaaninag ang maiiwang tinatago nito sa
kagilid-giliran ng labi.


III. 

Sa pagdating ng huling putahe, 
tila tanda ko lamang ang simula at wakas
ng gutom na gabi.

Kaya’t hayaan mong kamay ko
ang pumulot ng panghimagas
sa halip na tinidor
kung tulay din lamang ito
ng magkabilang sikmura sa mesa.

Sa bibig pa lamang ng tulay, 
susunduin na kita dala ang pulot na
gumagapang sa daliri
tungo sa siko.

Huwag mong awatin ang sarili
kung nais sumunggab, dumagan at
matunaw ang bigat ng agwat
sa pagitan nating dalawa buong hapunan.

Buo mong lulunin, lagpas pa sa ibabaw
ng balat na kahit kailan—
hindi natin tuluyang maaangkin.

Kaya’t kahit maduwal sa suson
na bumabalot sa palaman, palambutin mo ng
laway hanggang maabot ng lalamunan
ang buto. Nandito, 
nandito ako.












On their third night at the restaurant,1 the waiter
sat the two women across from each other.

Her body before her body,2
and in between is an order of correct
display to follow: 

please refrain from crossing
the fence to another appetite. 
Whatever you reach for that far away
can’t be worth letting other people see
how much you want it.3




Even the kitchen likes containing 
bodies.4

After separating the inedible, it serves only 
the skin named with a taste, texture, and
color that the guests in the dining hall can 
swallow

and throw the reeking
entrails of the first sin to the pile 
away from the white of the table spread,

the slivers of raw flesh still frozen
with apple-pink stains

that will always bleed
past the seasoned layer to taint the 
paths their knives slice.

It will pool from her plate to hers, 
sully their napkins, their collars,
splatter on a skirt’s pleat and

even as they mirror each other’s guilt,5
they will wipe it off from the
side of their lips.




At the arrival of the final course,
remember         the beginning and the end            of 
the    hollow6               night.

Let the                           
     reach                   ebb7 

           
both/either/their8     	     shame,9

bridge              
    honey’s           

descent                           



between



skin10 that                                                             
never belongs




Here,    
here.11









1. I translate kainan into a noun without a trace of hunger. It is culture, Isagani Cruz states, that we translate, not language.

When I carry this word-world over to the other, its bareness provokes my conservation. Its bareness needs the architecture of restoration for the body,

derived from the French verb restaurer. A house to domesticate the verb, a skin to enclose the bone. I cave in.

2. I cannot write their bodies, despite the compact spell of English. I insist on the syntax of our singularities to remind me of positional checkpoints.

To remind me and other bodies of inhibition. Or else meaning reproduces. Meanings that murder me to be necromanced as Walter Benjamin defines the

task of the translator. Meanings I will have no authorship of. Let them be me, then. The author, the murderer, and the necromancer. If betrayal is inevitable,

I will be the one to betray myself.
3. By now, my translation method should be evident. Like other criminal metaphors, I am a hijacker. But I am a hijacker at the gunpoint of another and

I am trying to distract him. Language is fundamentally a tool for persuasion and influence, and at times for deception; as lie is speech which hides our

authentic thought, said Jose Ortega Y Gasset. 
4. I privilege what the kitchen likes instead of what it’s like because translation is violent and I cannot look away from bodies being butchered.

Venuti explains this in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, of forcible replacements of differences and intelligibility entitled to the target language

reader, but here, it is retribution against the witness. I cannot sit in my oblivion and keep the safety of the shelter of the noun room. As a translator, I am too

aware of what is inside, the active operation of the verb containing.
5. I understand desire has long articulated itself a few lines ago but I still cannot seem to let it go. After dinner, after semantic equivalence, it is never too

late for this word to come. 
6. With John Ciardi, I admit a translator’s explanation is an apology for failure. I translate my own struggle in finding an equivalent that does not presume filling,

that does not reach outward. So I must name only the cavity present, with no promise of satisfaction. Heed the structure instead: the high, beautiful ceilings.

Remember, I am trying to distract him. For that, poetry disappears in translation. 
7. I decline dessert. The word morphemically harbors its own withdrawal: himagas, from pagas, to diminish. Ebb to retain the motion of lessening. As the original

saturates, I must translate toward recession. The vehicle of language grows unstable; something threatens to exceed my custody. 
8. Negotiation promises that “everybody” leaves with something, Umberto Eco warns me. Something surrendered for something to pass. The binary magkabilang still

implicates too many bodies at once, it names relation without assigning possession, and possession is what English demands. Whose is the shame (see: footnote 9) that

follows? Poetry is getting to me, its resistance to description unsettles certainty. Thus, I implicate all. No one owns shame entirely, no one escapes it.
9. I have to redirect appetite again (see: footnote 5), I must. Translation demands intimacy before intervention, and in the preceding processes, I have touched the gut

closely enough to replace it. I yield sikmura, the body’s interior insistence, to shame, its interpretation. That way, the source is not searched. Look here, I have gutted it

to presentation already. 
10. Corazon D. Villareal notes the Filipino propensity for anatomical thinking in linguistic expressions; the body structures meaning itself, the body, its semiotic

structure. The translator must choose which part survives. I intended to thin most of its corporeality to accommodate English’s metaphorical economy, which cannot

afford Tagalog’s wider, bodily semantic field. The skin was the safest to retain, the most translatable boundary. 
11. Following Derrida’s notion of an accord of tongues, replication would presume a totality translation cannot sustain. How could I ever conclude with fullness,

at this point? Has one mouth ever completed what the other mouth begins? And whose are these mouths? It has come to me, in my translation process, that completion

is not the aim. Excess remains immured in the nocturnal core of the source text. I cannot help it, the pure language emerging between the two, here, here.