Love in a Trailer Park

Yellow moon, green furniture.
That’s how I see you, darling, framed inside our trailer at night
I don’t see the stains, the mold
Feel the threat of eviction
Or notice the garbage cans out front, needing to be emptied
Or hear how that damned screen door squeaks, refusing to sit right on its hinges


I see only your handsome feet, dignified and surrounded by a garland of shag carpet
A rusty red wreath gathered around your toes
And then in the odd blue glow of the television screen,
The blurry static dances in soft white dots across your face
I giggle because even in this shitty place we don’t have rabbit ears to fuss with anymore.
We have a converter box that we bought with a seventy dollar coupon from the government.


I kiss your unshaven cheek and whisper, “wait here.”
Hands in flowered oven mitts, I slide out our TV dinners.
Salisbury steak tonight, honey—not because it’s the best,
but because tonight we’re feeling nostalgic.
Remember when we were kids, before we knew each other?
With separate parents and separate lives?
Both of us were sitting at our respective kitchen tables,
Watching Rescue Rangers. Eating Salisbury steak.


Here we are again, my love.
Even though back then we thought that as grownups
We would eat only pizza and chips,
That we would watch cartoons all day long
And do whatever we wanted,
Just because we could.

That rain sure clicks and clacks on this tiny metal rental
And now our stomachs are full with twenty-five cent frozen dinners.
We watch cartoons because there's nothing else to do
And our fingers lace when we finally fall asleep on that old green sofa
For all our big dreams, darling, things sure turned out different than we'd hoped.
Except we are together.

[inspired by my exciting new life as a social work intern, as well as my own dealings with unemployment-related poverty and the slightly grim job economic climate that awaits me upon graduation]

Night Poem

Within the fragile eggshell word lover
Rest the somehow sturdier words
Friend-Companion-Partner,
A linguistic chain creating connection, attraction.

His shoulder imprinting subtle lines into my cheek
And the warm-long cadence of his breathing
Causing me to rise and fall with the melodies of his chest

My nose turned to him, I try to breath in his skin cells,
Take his scent inside myself and
Keep him,
A floating, happy memory of air,
Of cologne and sleep intermingled.

I want to crawl inside of him,
press up fetus-like against against his internal organs.
Set up camp inside his body, beneath his flesh,
And wait for him there.

I have never been the type to love,
But even in his sleep he leads me to this unending conclusion,
His resting face an innocent jury condemning me
To years of love with him.

I cannot resist that face, that jury.
Nor do I protest my sentence.

[*Disclaimer: as a general rule (and probably wisely so) I avoid writing love poetry. **I just found the original to this poem, written about two years ago and inspired by my favorite short story ever, "A Long Walk to Forever". Pretty neat]

Bukas na Kuya

Death, you visit me occasionally, and here come you again with your sad veil to see me here once more. I thought I knew you, Death, thought I had deciphered your idiocyncracies, rhythmed your steps into a predictable gait of pain to be recognized and narrowly avoided. But now you reveal yourself, chameleon you is, as a new-dark lurker on my timid periphery, loitering your latest brand of hurt around the lurid corners of my life.

Kuya, patay kana sa akin. And now to the world?

I had a dream last night that I bumped into you in a supermarket. Under those glaring lights and walls of food, you were with the babies, and with clicking feet they ran to me. I wrapped around them until the impressions of my arms dug into their skin, and the look in my eyes inflitrated the core of their bodies so they could never forget my love. But panaginip, and that is all. The sad-sorry bungang-tulog which in the daytime ripens into nothing.

I can feel their warmth.

To think it all started with a wagging wagging dila, some stupid balitang kutsero like a broken arrow, like a message from some misplaced cupid to demagnetize the once magnetic bonds of pamilya.

Mahal mo pa ba ako?

How many times have I held a place for you, your empty plate at Thanksgiving warm with my shame and decorated with quick words to excuse your neglect?
How many times has my thin neck been placed on the slicing board to protect the integrity I was so sure you posessed? And you did posess.

Remember when we used to jump off the roof, or hammer jagged nails into pieces of plywood, or laughed until the laway dripped soppy from our mouths?

Mahal mo pa ba ako?

And whatever happened to the rest of them, to "mahalin mo ang iyong mga magulang", as you once told me? How do you think they feel to see now only your back, your now-dead back, ugly and sweating with regret?

I thought the world of you.

And yet still ang pag-ibig ko sa iyo ay tunay.

I remember boy of steel, with skinny arms so strong in He-man pose, climbing coconut trees and holding Tatay’s brown hands, knowing always what is love, what is land, what is blood.

Dugo at tubig, which is better, thicker?

So if you want to revisit the world of my heart, come in. Bukas na. It is already open.

Today is better.

perdido en la traducción (and the things we misplace)

Buried in a book
Perdio en la revista.
We all get lost in the translation,
This business of trying to language God.
For who dares place the Son
The moon the stars In a box,
A prepackaged dessert of heavenly glory,
A ready-to-serve God,God like a cheesecake.
Sarah Lee, Blueberry.
Deity for only 300 calories a slice.

We wonder what we are missing,
Conversing confusedly with our prepackaged Creator
Bitter that the
Cheesecake Christ
Doesn't respond.
All hail our God of parameters!
Locked in measurement,
Confined by chains of language,
Human rules and rites of passage
We wonder why God Fails to reach our expectations,
Why
He doesn't speak our tongue,
Bow to our rules.

God is not the God of one language,
One hemisphere.
Our presumptions too low,
We inspect our feet, Judging El Elohim by how much we know,
Eyes onPlatesWaiting for cheesecake,
While the Lion of Judah
And all His possibilities
Soar above,
Wishing We would look up.

Retail Therapy

Like when his sad long eyes shouted I love you!!
That's how you're looking at these shoes. Put them on and feel like magic.

He meant it, didn't he?

Suddenly, you're not the one longing--the shoes are, for you.

Later at work Boss calls you miserable (again), but the magic shoes whisper a novel concept: you are human, with feet that walk.

You quit. Boss's mouth inflates into her everyday cavern of Big Scary Talk, but you're not afraid anymore. This is your big day and you be-bop away from that dead end, onto the open road where you belong.

[I wrote this last year for the Fiction 101 Contest. Did not win, but boy was it cathartic to write!]