It is late at night somewhere
plain and dusty as he grabs my hips,
pulls me in, and kisses my
stomach. I touch him back.
Cheeks first, tracing all the
way down to his upper lip,
Then my finger circles back and lands
on a fallen eyelash
on the bridge of his nose.
I try picking it up but it won’t stick.
“It won’t stick,” I tell him to move
away from the flickering light.
I pinch it away from his nose and hide
it between my thumb and forefinger.
“Make a wish,” keeping the hermetic seal.
When he opens his eyes and smiles at me
(I like it when he smiles that wide, the canines and all)
I make him choose a finger. “Up or down?”
He taps my thumb. I open.
The hair is wedged between the whorls of my forefinger
— it means his wish won’t come true.
He gives me a sad, sad look.
The wind blows it away from
my fingertip. He pulls me in again,
my rough denim sliding up against his
thighs, spread open. I lose balance
and out of sheer reflex I grip his shoulders,
bare and drenched in night sweats. I wipe them off
with the cuffs of my jacket.
I brush his bangs to the side
and slide my finger across one of his sideburns,
which feel like new toothbrush bristles.
He asks me to exhale directly onto his eye.
He wants know if it would turn his vision foggy,
like when exhaling on glass. I tell him to shut up.
I tell him I want to ride a taxi home for once,
even though it’s just blocks away from here.
Inside the taxi, he barely looks my way.
He’s propped close to the window
blowing cold air and drawing *****.
I feel a need to check the time.
I feel a need to put his mouth on my mouth.
Then I think of wanting rain, of wanting all sorts of disasters
to smite our naked bodies as we slither
up against each other on the last floorboard
floating on top of this flooded city.
But I close my eyes instead. Trying to guess
what his wish was.

Mother taught me flight.
Father, hover.

I learned haunt, whine,
bother,

From looking at men
stripped down to their tidies
in those Avon magazines, I found out
I liked them. Look at that paunch.
Also that crotch. And the studio light twinkle
on skin & eyes.

I looked at the *****. You have to know:
this was no sin. I covered my head
with lace antimacassar as I traced
this man’s junk with my fingertips;
I was covered.

Save for that,
I did right by rules,
most of the time.
Scraped knee, split lip,
didn’t cry at those, no,
as so ordered.

We never tell girls this, but did
you know us boys have a rite of passage
supposed to be kept secret? It goes:
Your father takes you to a hardware store.
You ask why, and he only says “this is day,
the mark of the man.” You nod.
He takes you to the aisle
with all the blades:
shears, scissors, awls, ice picks, whatever.
He lets you pick one. He pays for it.
Father takes you home, gives you the cutting tool
of your choice, and tells you to go to the bathroom,
face yourself in the mirror, and
“aim for the tear ducts.”

It’s kept secret because
it doesn’t work. Not always, anyway.
I’ve heard about other boys that missed,
both eyes damaged.

Not all, not all.
My gentle father didn’t:
he bought me Flu Game Air Jordans,
the one with maroon slithering around black.
Boys always got expensive basketball shoes.
I suppose he loved his boy, is all.

Father’s not that bad. Mother, neither.
Only clueless, maybe.
One time I came home too happy,
head-drunk thinking about this schoolboy crush,
and they never knew.
The first time I jacked off I felt the entire sky
strike my pelvis with a typhoon fizz,
and they never knew.
During prom a boy slashed my heart with a
scalpel (his cutting tool?),
and they never knew.

You can’t teach boys some things,
like how to whisper to another boy
when the light is out.

When he moved into the new apartment,
he chose not to open the boxes right away.

Thrilled as he was to find new spots
for old things, he waited until it rained

to see if there would be any leaks on walls.
He waited, and waited, but the rain never came.

Without anything to touch, to play with, to arrange,
he spends days sitting on the wooden chair, the one

caked with paint drips. There, he ponders about the new place,
about when rain would finally come, and he imagines it

sounding like fingers tapping a hollow instrument, or perhaps
pat pat patting like a rabbit hopping toward shelter.

It comes one evening as he sleeps. Droplets
bulleting the tin roof. He does not wake.

In his dream, two men come rushing inside his home:
one slides a gun down his throat. He asks what they want.

The gun-wielding man doesn’t answer. He looks squarely
at him, on his knees nearly choking. The other man

is hauling all his boxes out of the new apartment, leaving
only the dusty outlines where they sat unmoved for months.

Finally, the man slides the gun out his mouth, shakes the spit
off the neck. I’m just new, why me? He asks.

Don’t ask me, I’m just a robber, the man says.
He takes off, slamming the door so hard the hinge breaks.

When he wakes, the rain has stopped. Still in the interim
between dream and real life, he checks if the boxes are still there.

They are. The windowsill is damp.
Outside, under the dim porch light,

he finds tiny puddles on the soles of his sandals.
He strolls lightly before the iron gate, and around him

the faint glow of light from neighboring windows,
the muffled voices of people on TV,

The rare wind who can’t decide
whether to whistle or chime.

Inside, he opens his boxes and fishes out
every hidden thing.

There is a place for each, and while there is something
to be afraid of, it’s not nightmares about thieves.

Leave me alone maybe means
go away yes but be here
in one call. When the ground beneath you
shakes keep going but turn back when
mud stops being thick.
Avoid getting too lost.
The unknown place after the reed
is off limits. Maybe

I put up the chainlink
because I want the trespass.
But that

way we only go so far.
The hope is that
you’re still an animal
by the end of this abuse,
unquestioningly

returning to the long-haired girl sweeping land with her herding call.
There in a blanket of mist, she stands barefoot and unmoving like a scarecrow.
She moors the cows to her side of silvery dawn.

—unquestioningly
because what is there to ask?
It is known to work, the ancient
Scandinavian song of lure.

‘Cause this is what happens
when you hand yourself
over to somebody else
& you’re alone in your head —
the least where you want to be
— wanting to find even a sliver
of evidence that they ran away vs.
you pushed them away & which
is worse. I am not yet tired of
remembering ruin. I want my
eyeballs soaked in a coffee pit.
I want the three seconds I admit
I need rescue to last longer before
I snap back & hit my face hard.
I want freedom to choose not to be me.
I want to be reborn as a motionless
centerpiece in a street with skyscrapers
so high they cover the sun. I want to
wear stripes & I want toy guns in the
compartment of my imaginary
2nd-hand Lexus & I want my food vacuumed
off the floor with a metal detector. I want
paper skin & dotted lines around my neck
& collarbone as if to say hit here, or find
the missing panel. I want to learn all forms
of worship & the names of all gods male
& female one-headed three-headed
featherskinned slimy able to breathe
under water can hold lightning can **** son
can shoot laserbeams from eye
can run like a horse & act like a man.
I want to touch a full moon with my bare hands
& I want to do as I am told & I want to
focus on my own paper & I want a sudden
stroke of genius to fly away like a plastic
bag before the tornado blows the roof off
our heads. I want to control the climate
& tilt the world a bit more downward
so Antarctica gets more nights. Somebody
whispered in the wind the secret of walking
& I think I already know what it is.

Under the train station from across the road
one musty midnight after a late dinner, I saw him.
He was alone. He watched jeepneys pass by. He
stared at the road. He remained still when
the other workers walked past him.
He held a 7-up or maybe a Mountain Dew
by the bottleneck & brought it to his lips to drink.
He was sitting on a stool too small for him
& so his legs were spread open.
He put his free hand on his knee, in between
fingers an almost finished cigarette.
His work suspenders glowed under the
plastic fluorescent light of Althea’s burger shop,
& beneath he wore a red shirt that
fastened his torso tight. When it was time to
ride my jeepney home, I looked at him for a moment
before getting on, & it could be that
he looked right back. When we
moved forward I tried looking again
but saw he was looking somewhere else.

Manila, 2018

In my house the men
wear breastplates for fun, and
the women race heavenly
on the speedway, the soles
of their feet caking with sand.
Yes, my house has a speedway.
If you close your eyes for a moment
it feels like a beach minus the tangerine
minus the birdcalls

minus the summer spit
frying old skin.