Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan

all words by angela gabrielle fabunan. not affiliated.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

When I was distant, a foreigner

in a country I dared to call my own,
I was a stranger, tempered by the wind,

steered where the rains called me
but it was always the sea that beckoned.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

In the market, the chicks cower knowing they’ll be / dead before the night ends

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

There are no great metaphors for reversal. / Perhaps the process of drying plums / day-old tinapa fsh in baskets / shrivelling into themselves / already frightened of exposure / of appointment and disappointment.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

You can turn any word
into a reprimand. You com-
-mand, -plicate, -e, sitting down.
You speak in a world of no error,
one hand near your slip of tongue,
the other seizing the steak knife.
Words, you eat until gone.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

something to hold something to let go of

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

And then we grew older, ravaged by time,
as a surf that hits the beaches, a slapping hand.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

America the beautiful, as we were,
nothing spoiled that vision, nothing
convinced me I wasn’t there,
and yet the shadows the water
cast beneath the cavern of rocks
helped me remember the fear I had disguised

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

At recess you swallow
the small morsels of lunch:
PB&J or kare-kare,

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

Today was a day for stories.
We were on the grass collecting
our trash and we floated on
airs of small talk compounded by
memory seeping out like flotsam.

but you might as well be dead
by the time the first avowal is made.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

Langit at lupa. Heaven, earth. Tubig at langis. Water, oil.
Anak at apo. Child, grandchild. Alab at abó. Fire, ash.
This is the afermath when your heart is a volcano.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

memories of balasiw: low bamboo beds,
dried fish for breakfast, then chatter,
a roasted chicken for lunch,
a long unwinding siesta,
then dinner, pickings from the farm.
laying down i would count the leaves
above my head, dreaming
of winter, my father was alive then,

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

You disremember, or realize,
you leave the country, you return,
it won’t change a thing:
your haunted version of memory.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

so we hush hush,
like the breeze through the grass,
comforting ourselves through tales
in which we are the ambiguous and confused
heroes of our generation.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

Like the flowers beside the grave
you return home to—
strewn with the dead,
a memory of the past

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

There’s nothing heroic about what you call maturing, / its simple truth, the inward turn, the change of color / on a once-green leaf—decaying then falling.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

I will always out talk you
and you will smile sofly
like a lover steeling the self
for a particular cruelty:
the sting, here at the shore,
waves hurtling sea-spray
towards where I’m standing

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

I am an archipelago and you / are a continent. I am a negative, a minus, a diference. To your positive, to your / addition, to what you are molding this country into. I am just baggage.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

here with me and then gone
or, rather, left behind in a memory
as it travels through the body.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

You were the certainty of Morning, you were the summertime Song / girls sprung from you were a Poem.

[Angela Gabrielle Fabotnan @fabunanbot]

When I was distant, a foreigner

in a country I dared to call my own,
I was a stranger, tempered by the wind,

steered where the rains called me
but it was always the sea that beckoned.