by Maria Bolanos
I.
Portrait of the artist as manananggal. Of manananggal as ghazal. How do I bridge myself? When in the end I am not art and everything is a monster?
Jackfruit cracked yellow jewels of skin. Rotting meat belly stretched ready for blood. Bully among classmates. Blessed art Thou amongst monsters.1
Take my tongue and twist it around pregnant pauses. I am a child spilled in half, drowning myself in the work, cracking open my sixth can of Monster.
Tonight, savage her body to the pale clocks. The dim ways of kiss, the chiming hands, the ribcage gates of Troy. My tongue’s a long scar they mistake for monster.2
I fly over the rooftops of all the places I came from. My wings rupture the pale moon, casting new shapes over the sleeping heads of conquered monsters.
Conquering limbs and name, astride sea gates the imprisoned Mother of Exiles. Give me your tired, your tempest, your teeming monsters.3
II.
Portrait of ghazal as found poem. Portrait of found poem as severed name.
Portrait of name as given history. History as blackout. Blackout as monster.
History is a hideous female, severing intestines, sprouting huge. The Tagalog separates itself. Crushed by sunrise. The west, salt and holy. Takot ka ba sa monster?4
The gulf of saltwater laps at my toes, smooths the hard edge of remembering. Fate is crossing water when we die. The land forgets me. We are each other’s monsters.
Hatred passed through, subway train lurching. Machinery of memory, a harshness.
Where is the dark rich land we wanted to wander through? My blood monster.5
Tear me through the middle like paper. Throw my heart to the jungle, my feet to desert. This way I am loved and lost, living like mother ‘s exiled monster.
So much an address it was like something living. Years after, you do not know what the address was. It is not a name, not a thing that exists, but some monster.6
The found phrases in each italicized couplet are from the following works:
- “Blessed Fruit” by Isabel Garcia-Gonzales, from Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology
- “Lorca’s Red Dresses” by Natalie Diaz, from When My Brother was an Aztec
- “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
- Wikipedia entry: “Manananggal”
- “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” by Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider
- Excerpt of a letter by Gertrude Stein, from Everybody’s Autobiography
Maria Bolaños (she/her/they) is a Filipina-American poet and book reviewer and is committed to building spaces to nurture and showcase Filipinxao literature as well as Black, Indigenous, and POC literature. She is the General Editor for Marías at Sampaguitas literary magazine and a 2021 Best of Net nominee. Her writing has been featured in Touchstone, Cut Fruit Collective, Antigone, CP Quarterly, and the International Examiner, among others. Her work can be found on her Instagram, @mariabeewrites.
