Jessie Raymundo teaches composition and literature at PAREF Southridge School. He is currently a graduate student at De La Salle University-Manila. His poetry has appeared in a few publications in print and online. He lives in a small city in the Philippines with his two cats.

 

Memory with Water

 

For now let’s talk about sinking

cities, said my mother

who carries a pair of Neptunes

in her eyes & paints about phantoms

 

in Philippine poetry. Gravity is when

the psychiatrist assessed you

& located a heart that is heavy

for no reason. In an instant, you were

 

in the sea: a merman sticking his head

above the surface, swathed in salt

water, standing by for austere arms,

like a remembrance possessed by echoes

 

of phantoms playing on a record player.

Almost always, there are greetings–

at sunrise, say hello to clouds, to roosters,

to the maps of music you made in your mind.

 

& when the morning arrived as a Roman

god of waters & seas, you finally crawled on land.

 

~

 

Gravity

 

I reread your letter & your voice

dives into my ears like shooting stars.

Words frozen, punctuation marks

like walls of a citadel.

The historic walled city where

you sketched me in a centuries-old

cathedral. I held the rosary we’d made

from old broadsheet newspapers.

The sweatier I got, the more

the beads around my wrist warped.

All statues without heartbeats

staring at you. All motionless,

rendered livelier by their staring.

More than three hundred summers ago,

Newton stared & witnessed

a heart fall out of the blue.

An aged brick, separated.

A bead detached. You’d never age

another year older. Everywhere, the devout

bending knees to the ground, saying prayers,

breathing without you. & I, too, living,

praying, motionless to adore the voice

the way I did the woman, spaces

like dust from space.

 

~

 

Bushes

 

Nights like these, we summon

a body, have it

abandon the wind-

down routine, the needed spindle

to prick the finger before the deep

sleep, how the curse is fulfilled:

dimming the lights, shutting the eyes

to omnipresent devices,

& if the mind begins to wander,

noticing it wandered. In front of your house,

our stomach rustling, filled

with the unseen, craving for eyes & ears.

Lola, you remember, has names

for these night noises: nuno, tianak,

sigbin. Fear not, it is just

us, the neighbors you have never

spoken with. How your fingers shiver

now, this moment with the woody stems

of your nightmares, our movements

synchronized under the spotlight

glare of the full moon.