OBLIQUE STRATEGIES: October 2010

We Sing The Wind's Caress On Our Skin: Twenty Sonnets

Out of the flame a body to forge with words into a god who breathes fire.

Begins with nothing and returns to mark our presence in syllables whirling into being his beloved's laughter.

III

The sound quivers, takes years to caress, becomes solitary, sings.

A story strung together between walls built for your deliverance is now stuck behind the wall, for lack of any other name. You say, "Break it." We witness the first crack.

Here is a room where a man lies to a woman. he says into her ear words like "this morning," "another day," "no time."

One of them will whisper many stories. She could say, "The mime danced a love story, 'A woman and a man were brought to their knees by hope or regret in the beginning of a different story.'"

VII

On the table, thirst thrives. "Let me offer you to come pick my bones clean."

VIII

The end began again and again. The boy limped into the room, a pair of scissors held close, his heart meeting the woman's, his hands shaping a word.

This word unfolds to you out of paper (folding its wings, paper).

Your limbs breathe out every night a precarious stance down against the floor (something within).

The seasons have intent of pollen and nectar to your garden just beginning to blossom again. What could you do? You can only study. What do I do?

XII

The garden and I gather her thighs her heart like blossoms will dance alone or with.

XIII

Is this ripening a motion to blossom? In my garden weeds grow between your teeth your body an intimate of earth of flowers, yes, this ripening.

XIV

Out of your body light to make everything broken withered crushed splintered beloved ripening. She calls back, a girl your age your light your song. It was she who first knew of you, gave you the gift of weeping. She danced, you cried out to her, "There, your feet shriveled broken lacerated." Your eyes open, images echoing from afar intangible anxious running nowhere. Her answer, "Anguish pain pleasure death are no more than paint. I paint my own vigil as a diptych on silence. Listen:" On this last morning, open a page.

Dead twenty years ago to the light rising to meet my eyes, I want to say, "The dead love, lust, hope.' Instead life crossed. "Open."

XVI

Light rising to merge only now in this garden.

XVII

The light taking leave our bodies motion their own speeches postcard-pretty: an ordinary scene on an October day which will probably be something indestructible.

XVIII

This island with the sea bring to mouth sounds of a language desiring this bird this air skies and mountain this rock with seaweed this rock this air this day seawaves this island desiring.

XIX

Mapped by memory, the island scribes a story: "A revolution was fought - mothers pause to tell the story: 'The churchbells rang; someone set fire to the padre, by noon turned to ashes. I sing this story from your open window near the island shore, the edge water, air, burning.'"

Memory is only a matter of going further - the landscape horizontal, then hands clasping, unmoored, the distance spanned, luminous even now, deep in.

o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Note: these were written as monostitches, ie, to be laid out as continuous lines running in the middle of double-page spreads, one line per fragment, all in aid of mimicking the horizontal breadth span of rural landscapes and dead calm sea waters. Only due to the limitations of the blog layout, it is presented here as paragraphs. This is meant to be the second part of a rural travel diptych (as opposed to my usual "urban travel" pieces), the first being the seven-day rundown of ink polaroids prior to this blogpost. These were also written as contribution for Paper Monster Press's poetry zine. Sadly, I did not make the deadline. Any takers here? Send me an eMail!

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Seven

Molehill Mountain

The air was nippy. The van was deft. The clouds were syrupy. There were birds and tricycles and Koreans. There was cowshit on the road. At the airport, there were sculptures made of mangrove driftwood. I ate a burger.

Ridiculous Realisations, #4

Any landing you can walk away from, etc etc.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Six

Homecoming Holdout

Rest and recreation and romanticisation are granted a reprieve - a refurbished room redolent of Sunday afternoons.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Five

Souvenir Stash

Four fridge magnet masks, three coin purse fish, two turtle-sunfish transformer keychains, a clam compact and a dreamcatcher.

Boredom Begets

- Ingenuity: it is made of two pieces of similarly-carved wood, one over the other, joined at their opposite ends by a small peg in such a way that the top piece swings over the bottom piece like an eclipse, turning the turtle into the sunfish.

- Humour: at its underside is the expected indigenous inscription unexpected as a typo, intentionally inscribed by a kindred individual, ecstatic, inspired.

Cloud Cover, III

No stars. No moon. The man in the next table is entertaining his friends with a short lecture on breached births.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Four

Cloud Cover, I

Apprehension to gratification for the preservation of your complexion.

Ridiculous Realisations, #3

- Suicide and its reverse are both motivated by extreme selfishness.

- There will be islands with nobody in them. There will be jellyfish in the reefs. There will be sand dollars fashioned into rings. You wash your hands in the water, the sand as abrasive, schools of fish around you. There will be time to sit on the sand, the skin of water still, still atomising the limestone across millennia, turning to sand to be washed with, sat on. There will be time to submerge on the warm water collar-deep, a bathtub shared with the world, all wastes washed away. There will be surprise at the pressure differential. There will be surprise at the buoyancy. There will be surprise at the warmth. You only think you smell sulfur. There will be fear for your balls.

Cloud Cover, II

You lay on your back and look up at the night sky. Finally, there will be stars.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Three

Cataloguing Continues

As classic R&B thumps from the bassynova radio on the private three-person boat in my isolated white-sand islet four hours off port I wipe the crabmeat from my fingers and swig a cold drink as I watch a girl in a two-piece bikini and a winsome smile jump up and down in the sand call my name, the sky clears, a significant cloud appears, and I think: This is the end of history.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day Two

Burgeoning Biblioklept

The girl leaves her book in the shelf, inscribed, dated that day, not an hour ago, still smelling of her fingers. It's the latest novel of an author I grew up on, an author I used to love. I flip through the pages. I don't understand the words.

Peak Peek, I

The monotony of 719 concrete steps is intermittently broken by photos taken of the town and the bay, the hotel and the room's window always the point of reference. Touching myself, I keep expecting to see myself peeking through the curtains, touching myself.

Peak Peek, II

The monotony of 719 concrete steps fanned the fires of expectation for the 720th - an air-conditioned big burger breakfast? Instead: a seven-storey neon cross, the lights off, and an isometric view of the town and the neighbouring islands. Before lunch is over, I try to make an acquaintance of a sleeping giant.

Ridiculous Realisations, #2

Later, in the bathroom, I discover tan lines left by my thongs.

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Palawan Polaroids: Day One

First Flight

While strapped to 64,000 lbs of plastic and steel and fuel and wire going 700 kph 25,000 feet up in the sky covering 400 kms in 35 minutes with 80 other individuals, the most interesting thing for the fat girl across the aisle is solving her sudoku.

Rough Ride

Mountains treed and untreed. The occasional bridge and dead river underneath. Tricycles and 4x4s and transport trucks. Passing through private property after private property divided by fences and posts and markers, road paved all the way.

No animals throughout. Dinner four hours later, a couple of lazy tortoiseshell cats resting beside the electric fan. The mother wakes up, meows Where are your brothers? The child replies, I don't have any.

Chinese Cardtricks

A table away, two couples play Crazy Eights. One of the boys is drinking a liter of softdrink. One of the girls is reading a book. The other boy flips an ace by mistake, landing by my left foot. I pick it up and give it to him and he mutters Sinkyu, sinkyu. I wave my hand chummily dismissively, S'okay, s'okay.

Things to Try

To weave dreams.

To enjoy the legacy of light. Or rather, to enjoy life under the sun.

To come home with an ochre tone.

To see - to reflect on and to touch - the skin of water.

That is, kung ibig ko lang.

Ridiculous Realisations, #1

- Home is not just down the road, nor over the hill, nor a mountain away. Or rather, Home is only 35 minutes away going 700 kph north by northeast, etc etc.

- I'm the only non-foreign tourist guy in the bar. Or rather, I'm the only person not tabling a white guy.

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RECALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: KRITIKA KULTURA ANTHOLOGY OF NEW PHILIPPINE WRITING

We have called and we have received but sadly they are still not enough!

Contributions are still welcome for the first special exclusively literary issue of Kritika Kultura, the international online journal of language, literary and cultural studies published by the Ateneo de Manila University and indexed by Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI), MLA, Scopus, EBSCO, and DOAJ. This particular issue is intended to be an anthology of new Philippine writing.

The Philippine literary community has a relatively longstanding tradition of releasing anthologies focusing on young writers. However, it can be gleaned that the notion of the “new” remains unarticulated, as recent anthologies simply focus on the “young,” and what becomes apparent is the persistent maintenance of an aesthetics solidified in various creative writing institutions and workshops, a notion that is rapidly rendered inaccurate by a healthy production of writing that these anthologies do not include.

What this issue of Kritika Kultura intends to accomplish is to represent the kind of writing that is rarely published, the kind that is not often legitimized by mainstream publications. The kind of writing that we, as editors, can confidently call “new.”

New, in this case, is still defined as the word that most succinctly describes literary texts that are mindful of—by way of formal response/appropriation and/or thematic confrontation—several contemporary cultural phenomena such as the preponderance of piracy, the simultaneous/schizophrenic sociopolitical conditions of the nation, the “new” government that includes so many of the old names, the highly provisional stances in criticism pertaining to society and art, the currency and increasing value of topicality and ephemera (as evidenced by BPOs, SEOs, and Facebook), the persistent dominance of celebrity culture, and the gossip paradigm of discourse.

The anthology welcomes contributions that transgress genre boundaries, revise traditional modes and forms, formally engage with the largely oral, nontextual/extratextual literary practices of the Filipino audience, and display a technical alertness to the quandaries presented by blog-driven writing, Facebook fiction, protest poetry, the malleability of languages, the hegemony of academic publishing in “legitimate” literature, the dominion of western literary models, and, in light of these, the strategic and arguably fictionalizing construction of Filipino identity.

Send reviews! Send interviews! Send mixtapes! Send lists! Send photos! Send komix! Send strangers’ Facebook status messages! Send tarot card readings! Send scraps of texts pasted and strung together in an effort to make a cohesive whole! Just as long as they are smart and beautiful and new!

Contributions are welcome from Filipino writers from everywhere, who have either not yet published books of their own or have only one published book. Submissions can be in any language, but English translations must be provided. Multiple submissions are accepted, but each submission (belonging to a particular genre) has a 5,000-word count limit. Submissions must not have appeared in national publications. Email your submissions as file attachment (.doc or .rtf format), and use the surname and the genre-label (for instance, Cruz Poetry or Cruz Nonfiction) as filename. Submissions may be emailed to kk.litissue(at)gmail(dot)com. The deadline for submissions has been extended until November 6, 2010. Kritika Kultura is a refereed, now an ISI-registered, publication. You can brag about that to your friends! The issue will be released in February 2011. Brag about that, too!

Mark Anthony Cayanan
Conchitina Cruz
Adam David

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