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| MIKAEL DE LARA CO |
| Cryptic |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS POEM. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. |
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| Twenty-peso bills are orange and fifty-peso bills are red and the dead men on them were presidents and still we couldn’t decide on whether to leave a tip or to lie down in a field of whithered dandelions. I don’t think I’ll ever miss snow if I lived in this country, she said. Walang salita para sa snow dito, I said. She didn’t understand, who would, but I spoke just the same. Niyebe, the man beside me said, but I knew that he, like everyone else at the table, just wanted to get inside the girl’s pants, so I pointed out three hundred and thirty-three years of Spanish rule. The sun was busy trying to fit itself inside a spoon. I was thinking of lying down naked on a field of withered dandelions with a Polish exchange student, thinking of how to say “big dick” or “tight twat” or “Fuck you, Arnold” in Polish, but I remembered the Terminator was Austrian, and this guy’s name wasn’t Arnold, anyway, but he had a tattoo that said wielki biokragly, which means big dick in Polish, and his fists reminded me of war and anesthesia and guts strewn across fences. I leave in two days, the girl said. Does that mean come up to my room? Does that mean I’m burning, you look like it too, let me cool you down with the fists of snow inside my body, hold me with your sun-stained hands? Welcome to Fantasy Island. Why don’t you get a chair, dream on, talk to the hand, mutter titing malaki, makipot na puke, parusa ang magwika, which means big dick, tight twat, to speak is to suffer. Your tongue sounds beautiful, she said and I knew she didn’t mean it that way. What does it mean, she said but in my head I was already home and she was with me, under me, writhing on my sheets, shouting Wielki biokragly! Wielki biokragly! In my head I was already writing a poem. Fuck you, Arnold, so what if you can speak nine languages, the poem would say. No words for snow in my tongue, it would say. To speak is to suffer it would say and in the background the sun raging as it does in the tropics, parusa ang magwika and rice paddies as far as the eyes can see, parusa ang magwika and a field of brittle brown petals so near to dust. This poem is part of the collection that won First Prize for Poetry in the 2007 Palanca Awards |