Plena

ni Frank Lima
aking salin


Buong araw akong naglalarong kunwa’y nalulunod
hinahanap-hanap ang usok
ng mga pilikmata at kupas na buhok
ang mga lilang anino ng dugo
at ang mga nalalabing guho ng kape
pero sa gabi
napapanaginipan ko ang huling pantig
sa puso ng aking ina
ang huling pulang kataga sa kanyang mga baga.

Examination at the Faculty of Medicine, 1901

Windows. I was to gloss on windows without rippling the spirit. All the noses twinkling for kisses, but each had been reserved for the tiny thumbs of spectacles. Recall how hold on tight signaled the wildest of freedoms. I know this, I have this, you know I have this. You know what’s exciting? These things change and from this point on you should refer to them as people. You know anybody where just about nothing lurks? Before all this—what comes in the morning? Aftertastes of daring.

Frank

“What you see before you, my friend, is the result of
Constructivist women.”

        Taste
        Underground
        Vanguard
                Witty
                X-Ray

Due to “a fluke of fate—     a kind of love letter to
kinds of stories that move me are the ones where we

shy, sensitive, bullied, Dungeons
overtaken by      resolutions from a straight

copyright law,” both      brave new worlds: tracing
hands, scouts for his body and      Open one.

left—settle

apostasy and Co.

Swift, chronicler of      the loaded
and reading in the nude: On

thousands of year-      -music and a hymn to female
protest the sentence      that time forgot.

“Baby      from a language that isn’t mine?”
“Milk it until it’s      in debt to someone’s love?”
     
Reading the rock      vs. “versioning
a happy spinster, a famous poet and a grande dame.”

Something of a sea
in love with a parishioner

January—hold

L

She was a charmer. Something of a looker too, so that made some things easy. Some, with eggs scrambled on the sidewalk. Had this tug-of-war with a friend over a boy. The friend lost, and your mother would, in time, marry the boy. Hazy about the particulars, but my sympathies went to the friend anyway, who was a mutual friend, less of a looker, but it was only sympathies anyway and what is to be jewel-boxed from such things. Where you are now if not seriously planting a device? How much of you is your mother, how much of you is your father, how much of you is the friend of your mother you knew nothing about and she had a much longer name: whoever taught you how to play the abacus owes you a refund. None of the above, an activist. She would never have told you.