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BALIKBAYAN, BY KRYSTA FROST


Again, landscape swallowed
               by wind, lawns thatched
​               ​               with shadow, trees surrendering

colors they can no longer bear.
​               My hands and what they cannot
​               ​               keep: my mother

and her promises to make do
​               with hunger. I try to fold myself
​               ​               into mercy but I am an American

daughter. How an ocean away
​               my mother delights
​               ​               on another ruptured rapture

I cannot see. Where the sky knows
​               no ruin and the heat speaks
​               ​               in tones of water.

Here, my skin dehydrates
​               beside the heater as the
​               ​               world bruises itself into rot.

I want a story to tell, imagine
​               her a bird in search of warmth
​               ​               and I a late bloomer still unfurling

my wings. Someday I said
​               I’d follow her, grow my own
​               ​               cavity as big as a country

and soften like a wafer to its whims.
​               To feel the tug of love
​               ​               like an anchor

to the gut. To spoil my gums
​               with its sweet and swell
​               ​               my stomach with the slow swelter

of belonging. Until her return I wait
​               and wait, my prayers unwound
​               ​               into breath as mirrors turn

their faces in apology.
​               When she arrives,
​               ​               the air is a different quality.

I take in mouthfuls. How it hurts:
​               the warmth that cannot
​               ​               ​make amends with this body.



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Krysta Lee Frost is a mixed-race Filipino American poet who halves her life between the Philippines and the United States. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, The Margins, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hobart, wildness, and elsewhere
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