BALIKBAYAN

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.

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