Suppose it depends on which way your neck is bent.
Up north, I hear talk of evergreens. How’s it any different
from here, where there is no word for winter?
Names accrue like seasons. Tragedy precedes, and we follow.
An immigrant poet could write about mothers, as they inevitably do.
If I open my mouth, then who will spit in it? Someone else’s
eyes trailing the back of your head, resentment like leaking gas,
rainbowed in the light of rain. The city is cleaner than you left it,
but less like a city now than a mall. What, realistically, could you
call a round trip? There is a story about my aunt’s old mango tree.
Or another aunt’s plastic bags, folded like flags, military style,
tucked beneath the kitchen sink. The fever first in your throat, then
your legs. The light which candies the leaves. The fruit barely at a swell
and still April is cruel wherever you go. The city, bloodier
than you left it, and no less broken. How much is left to look back on?
How much future is left anyway? If I could choose, I would choose
this life over again. An immigrant poet could write about groceries
or a touch or the moon, which all poets require but always
fall short of obtaining. Why this endless need to self-alchemize?
Or perhaps it is just barely enough to know
what makes one unbearably real: a bookstore, an underpass,
old-growth forest, stranger’s sweat, Manila in the daytime,
chaparral grove, my aunt’s mango tree, Brooklyn in July,
airplane window seat, stranger’s piss, Manila at night,
California tidepools at dusk, the gasoline smell
of a freshly crushed leaf, and saltwater, saltwater, so much
of the living saltwater

by Sebastian Barros

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