BALIKBAYAN, BY KRYSTA FROST |
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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