The women in a family
I.
In softest cream cashmere, silk draping
wrists of verbena, vanilla, rose.
Bronze chargers under china, layers
of scent: rosemary roasting turkey, bread
baking. Today is a joyful day.
The embroidered table runner
and the periphery of memory: this girl
cupping the phone as she whispers
to the tinny voice of a dispatcher
or that girl watching her mother breathe
into the crumpled brown paper bag.
Can you sum the pain: the hot weight
of bully slaps across the face
to the side of the head
or hands on vacated bodies, wine-dank breath
Can you sum these lives and portion it
like slices of pie
served to mothers are daughters
nursed, are sisters are cousins
lifting the forks to their lips.
To call it strength but what is it
but to daily wake, walk, eat of it.
There is no Greek chorus here.
II.
Lips licked, decadent meal done
Cousins and daughters languid
on couch cushions. Couches
across therapists’ offices
a dozen fair haired young women
their constellations of disorder
closeness and cold retreat.
Row, row, row your boat
these dozen cousins singing in a round.
This leaning tower has stood
over six hundred years on its soft ground
its flawed foundation has withstood
four earthquakes.
The water will recede
The house was being carried downstream, I saw her
face in the window, stilled in grimace. I steeled myself
to face her dying and I stood. But fell
at each particular of death:
Bridges torn apart, downtown submerged in water then rubble
A drowned body that sinks then rises to the surface
torso floating higher than head and limbs.
Our flooded house is half-standing, a jagged bit of wall
buckled beams, like a roadside animal’s skeleton
clinging to a few patches of carcass.
My dead garden where a stray dog shit in my flowerbeds.
They tell me it never was: the wax-leaved magnolia tree and its burst
blossoms in my backyard. They say it was always an empty spot of lawn,
that it is impossible to trace Orion even though the stars remain.
I walk through the mud and step on the shit, I shed and lose
that softest skin and with this self who has lost—
On soaked, leveled ground, I rise with the songbirds.
I am beyond gutting and my rage distills.
I wash the always full sink of dishes, food still caked on
feel the crushed garlic on my fingers, spreading it over root
vegetables for roasting, steam from the pot of soup, its promise.
My children take this food I have made.
My children who herald decency and the real flesh of others.
Placing these dishes before my children
My children eat hamburgers.
Light brown wisps cover my infant’s soft skull
eyes: greenish, skin: pink. Then pale pale
like his father but the baby’s
pale skin won’t burn as mine doesn’t.
We’re of two countries. The first:
Islands sparkling in the sun, and bloody gnashing
of a colony. Then here where no one
in its old memory has a face
like mine, my family’s lines not tender-fed
in its soil.
But how to eat of the land where I was born
its trauma and revolution
the buoyancy, the making do
the Art of it.
Grit and pieties
that are old, ancestral
I want my children to feel this country
in their fight and the pits of their stomachs—
to know my great grandfather led guerilla fighters
in the jungle
Are they strangers to what is in their blood?
We’re restless but for this clockwork of tables
set by a hundred titas—the aunties—
Lumpia in tidy rows and glistening stews
the tangy adobo, grilled fish, bones still in
recall an afternoon eating by the sea.
Take and eat
each bite of rice and fish, soaked
in soy sauce mixed with garlic, vinegar
a bit of calamansi, perfection.
There are no banana leaves at this table
but it summons to dinnertime
in the barangay.
Dusk fallen, street vendors barbecue pork
mothers cook in the kitchens, windows
open, steaming food and
relief that another bone weary day
of work is through
under the too heavy tropical air.
Funeral homes and new fluencies
I am an encyclopedia of organ failure, prognosis, orifices.
Having walked miles in pea-green and peach tiled hospital corridors
to the low budget movie sets of funeral homes—reception ballroom
leads to chapel, living room, a counter for cremation orders.
My love is now actuarial and I count the wakes.
Bereaved father who forgot to clip the back seam of his new suit jacket,
someone pointing out who first sold the boy heroin,
and mythology of a grandpa on both the Eastern and Western fronts,
or my father’s dead body less than a decade older than my body now.
I am too tired to do an accounting of the ways I failed them, various,
too tired to remember about Plato and immortality of the soul.
I’ve never touched food at a funeral home reception. All I want to eat
is to smoke a cigarette with my nineteen-year old body
that didn’t even know it had lungs because they didn’t hurt.
Monica Perez-Nelson is a Filipina-American poet who is working on her first collection. She returned to writing after a long dormancy and is also a mother of two and a health policy lawyer who specializes in data and AI issues. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, sons, and dog, Tulip. She jots poetry notes on scraps of paper while at her kids’ soccer games, swim meets, and practices.
Image: Jessartcam, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
