“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”

— Natalie Diaz, The First Water Is the Body



Insanity (mis)happens when I

exile forty thousand heaves

inside a palm. Watch the dermis

disintegrate into foams of saliva and

grime and the dystopian ferment

of calamansi detergent spilled thin

on a ripple of fingerprints.

Acid swirls: eroding sardonic histories

blemished in the skin of a mouth.

At twenty four, I look at childhood

the way translation disassembles memory:

in held whispers of rusted spoons,

the silt-heavy hush of erstwhile rivers,

a lexicon of tooth-dust,

aversions etched in the wound of wonder vein

lapping backward for a touch.

Childness meant my mother perfuming

her worries in the shape of laundry water.

Small act of unbending solitude

imprisoned in the asterisks of girlhood.

Her hands, suspended in grief,

wrung the cotton until the weave

remembered its own drowning.

I echo her sentiment in the blouse collar

thinned by the wash,

the contours of pleated fabric

relegated to the margin of a balance sheet;

mistake a peso for absolution, hear

the rotten misanthrope

manufacture birdsong in the lilt

of a vesper. The promise of freedom,

estranged in polyester skirts,

now metered by economic impressions

of a postered laugh in the wake of an emergency.

Fancy another document to stare

as it washes the last centavo in her pocket

before the pen marks an [ ].

Elsewhere, we indifference desperation

in grounds where dirt absolves no miracle.

Only a document of domesticated

tiredness, passing monitory despairs

in the husk of an empty townhouse,

walls creased with the salt of her wrists,

paper bills soaked bubble

foaming in endless spin cycles.

Like memory, it recoils and folds. As

conceptual as how the brain conjures

a gesture before a hand

eddies into the air.
Along San Vicente, she tarries

innocence away in the smoke of a wet bend;

the ammonia of nineteen ninety two

clinging against the bed of nails.

Wind displaces only the weight of nostalgia

buried in the lesions of remembering.
                                 If dementia is burden I choose,

                                 let absence be the mother I carry.

                                 Watch me claw at concrete

                                 until wildflowers lull into dirt.

                                 Let me force a wound where

                                 language blisters.

                                 Please, let me put my mouth to it.