a woman bald the smell of ash
that used to be hair
looks five times her age
call her pearl call her orient call her philippines call her
and flames drop from her face like snake heads
she says god grew tired of us
she’s waited for the wars to be over
imagine her eyes turning completely red in the peopled wailing
when white men stuck on a globe of happiness
that had absolutely no world
but a fabric of blood and synthetic stars
why wait for too long, and do it all over again?
it could be that she is no longer waiting
perhaps this is her eruption the right to display
what has waiting taken away from her
now she has just an eye
where can one eye take her? I don’t know
I don’t even know why I have patience
call her surviving call her philippines call her right eye
do you see what I see?
it is not a miracle
her one and only eye cannot move, blink, or cry
not anymore
like an earth bereft of sense and majesty
have you been in such a place?
this is why she says
this is not life I tell her body
that is heavily burned
the color of coconut husk
her neck, breast, ribcage, legs
more of a stretched out coconut husk than human
I was punished
in any sickness of time nobody deserves that
those years, as I say, are done
but punishment has no exact ending
inexactitude makes punishment punishment
a girl comes next, looks like her child
looks okay, right for her age
but you haven’t heard what’s screaming above her
who’s steaming rotten meat behind her
how many angry men are eating after her
how there’s not one sound of pulse inside her
or where her heart is inside her
and why there’s a phallic monument
inside her
and then comes another girl and another girl and a boy
and another boy and the rest—all shadows
I ask them if they are hungry
if they could hear me
if I could walk them to the nearest hospital
if they could stay
if they could talk
I write on my map
“this is where the future would likely perish without knowing it”
B.B.P. Hosmillo is a queer and anti-colonial writer from the Philippines. He is the author of Breed Me: a sentence without a subject / Phối giống tôi: một câu không chủ đề (AJAR Press, 2016) with Vietnamese translation by Hanoi-based poets Nhã Thuyên and Hải Yến. His writing is anthologized in Bettering American Poetry 2015 and has appeared in Apogee Journal, Connotation Press, SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal, The Collapsar, The Nottingham Review (UK), and Transnational Literature (Australia), among many others. His interviews can be read in Misfits Magazine (UK) and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. He is the founder of Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art, a poetry reader for BOAAT Journal, and occasionally a guest poetry editor for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. He is currently the Associate Expert at the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the auspices of UNESCO in South Korea, where he is finishing his next poetry book, Black Paradise.