"Since Metro Manila has an elevation of around five meters, it seems to be living on borrowed time."
Philippine Inquirer, 2019

i am the daughter of a girl without a mother    
born on an island bordered by water

my closest ones live too far away from me  
scattered like dozens of inlets floating on water

in Tagalog the verb mag-alala  [ to worry ]     shares a root with pag-alala [ to remember ]
every year i grow older   & more likely to drown from water

my home is a country   joined together by a liquid border
in thirty years   the city that birthed me will be under water  

every poem i write has become an elegy     mourning the loss of a country i invented
that only exists in my childhood memory     and memory is as fragile as water