Use all the combinations of consonants,
Blends, short and long i's;
Try intonation or diphthongs;
Resort to linguists;
Spell in Welsh.
You can't approximate
The muted sound
Of a breaking heart.

Rapture, growing voice around the corner.

Crisp new diphthongs, sorry rounded vowels

unrehearsed. A twanging reverb. Certain

loosened phrasings shock the doorknob, like

'Clara...octaves...failings'. When I lift the


latch it's broken trailing consonants

streaming past the ceiling; bassy treaties,

sighing falling clothes and chord-crushed feeling.

I once fell for a poetess
A lyricist of songs
She alliterated everywhere
With such cracking shaped diphthongs!

I
Your friends here think you have it all:
and on a secret-sometimes
(mornings when the wind is
blowing the perfect amount
of sea-spun and menthol crush-)
you might agree.

You’re smart; if domineering,
and funny; if a bit cruel.
You throw your body against doors,
announcing yourself to whole
buildings with small heaves and breathy hellos;
always dumbly surprised by the hollowed out fiber
of your upper arms but refusing to acknowledge
the irony that in the months since your muscles
quit feasting on themselves
you have only grown weaker.

These friends let you talk.
You talk and talk.
They marvel at the stampede of your
stories; unnerved by the way your voice digs
into the room like a charging foal and
spins dust rising across the tabletop.
With struck lids and no warning
they blink stinging eyes clean
while stacking your bolting, blocky words
straight to the ceiling,
a reverse game of jenga.
You don’t make sense,
Alone you built a tower of babble.

II
In class you learn to speak like it’s the first time;
you chew on diphthongs and expel plosive consonants.
You pitch crude phrases high across the room
and discover the implications of each single breath.

In trucks and diners you learn to love like it’s the first time;
you kiss with your eyes closed and let fingers wander.
Your hands have a habit of tangling into his and you throw
your head back when you laugh,
(your palms are sweating
but you’re dauntless in this twilight-
go ahead; bare your throat.)
When he suddenly; fiercely,
lifts your body off the ground and into his
you no longer apologize for the weight of it.
You’re pretending to have made peace with gravity.

III
You’re the girl who seems to exist as an anecdote.
You are bits and pieces of a weird,
rambling journey assembled into a crinkle-*****
Raggedy-anne body who has giggled in a thousand accents
and crushed a million cigarettes butts
into the earth between a handful of
state lines and boot soles.

You’ve become an idea that people like;
a girl who is endlessly creating and curetting,
exploring and groping bits of everything across
years and maps and daydreams.
Her resume impresses-
she has no roots.

And you too like the idea of her-
She walks lightly and smiles.
She marvels and hums,
she is quick downplay
her own electricity.

She’s all short dresses and motorcycle boots.
She tumbles into splits down the hallway,
she’s long hair flowing behind a gush of
dark humor and kind words.
She feels it all and deeply
but the way she lays with hurt
isn’t sticky or scalding,
She simmers quietly. She ***** in her cheeks
and gnaws at her fingernails; grinning.

IV
She is an enigma;
the salty girl, eyes raw, with the pocketful of poems.
She's the girl who takes her dark days and catalogues
them into sepia stanzas. She soaks them in
hindsight and hangs them up to dry
along a string of Christmas-light-twinkling
words and confessions. She watches closely
as they develop into something she can begin
to understand. She waits expectantly
as they bloom into a blurry portrait
of who she might really be.

Because the girl you’re left with when the
people who like you so much have gone home
and your poetry has receded from the homepage
of publications to dusty archives-
this girl isn’t so definite.

V
You vaguely know her.
You haved walked together. You sometimes nap inside her.
She likes to wear your face.
You’re working up the courage to introduce yourself.
You don’t mind knowing this girl, she’s fine. She’s trying.
and maybe one day you’ll start to let other people know her too.
I mean, we’re all just trying.

mi alma is made of pineapple fabric,
bartered in the palengkes of San José,
nothing like the silk of Manileño prep-school boys,
in their country clubs and villages with gates,
classmates whom I envied for their patrician ways,
whose diphthongs I eventually learned to emulate
as I dyed my pineapple-fabric soul with neon desires,
neon as bright as New York City lights,
and put on an invisible muzzle on my face.
but what was harder to wash away from my soul of piña
was the stench of garlicky stews we ate in San José,
so foul that even aswangs kept their distance,
'stead of ******* me out of my mother’s womb and taking me away,
throw me up deformed somewhere in the UK,
deformed like the glorified mongrels that are my cousins,
those UCL-educated mestizos, or was it LSE?
oh, maybe my life wouldn’t have been so ******* mierda,
in a corporate attire with a three-thousand pound pay!
but unfortunately, I wear my alma of pineapple fabric
masticated by the teeth of unsolicited advice,
fragrant with cathedral incense, heavy with the guilt
of having been cummed on by ersatz lovers, ‘straight’ best-friends
whom I’ve cut out of my life like overgrown fingernails,
for tripping over loose threads and undoing my soul,
oh, yes, I get lonely without my BFFs, but at least
I still have mi alma de piña, my greatest source of pride,
fragile pride as fragile fabric must be dry-cleaned monthly
at Au Beau Blanc, Gallardo Street, Makati City,
elegant but indeed makati (which is Tagalog for really really itchy)
remember: don’t you ever dare to wash me in the Machine!
or as I like to call it the Lacanian Other clothed in moreno skin,
castrative, repressive, myopic Manilense society, nope!
I will not go to spinning class with synthetic souls ever again
cannot chismis anymore about Manila scandals over brunch,
because my soul is made of pineapple fabric
and pineapple easily tears apart at the seams,
shedding its fibers behind in faraway places,
foster cities and countries with their irrevocable stains,
like those of chimichurri and malbec in Buenos Aires,
Debería haber nacido en Buenos Aires, I always like to say
‘cause it would be more chic to drown myself in Rio de Plata
than the ****** waters of ******* Manila Bay.
Pues, thank God, I didn’t, because now estoy en Spain
and of vermut ***** con aceitunas I am always inebria—
ted, waxing nostalgic for a time when these white men
would’ve scoffed to see an Indies dress,
would’ve asked my pineapple fabric soul to untuck,
scared to be stabbed by some concealed, mystical kris,
but no! don’t get me wrong! I love Mother Spain!
but I don’t think I belong here either,
nor in Buenos Aires or the United States,
nor will I belong again in any one of those seven thousand isles,
which my fingers fidget with like the rosaries I pray
to call out to the god of overseas workers,
the patron saint of the unmoored, the new cosmopolitan
oh, please help me conquer, for the sake of mi alma en pena
hecha de piña, now ruined, stinky, sullied, stained,
help me find a street, an enclave, a hamlet, or a shore
just somewhere—a corner to feel not so out of place.

the page was blank
and then This.

i parked words
where they should go
and now
This.

i come apart to
join a choir.
and all
things
sing.

i fetch a golden fleece
from timid scars
and coerce my loneliness
into a corner
of blatant
touch

as my open mind
dissolves
into sea a of
unrelenting
waves

combing every beach of the world
with diphthongs
and amethyst

and too many joys
to deny.

or resist.

But I struggle to say the word c-----
such a clumsy combination of diphthongs
is that right, check it out later

Why not just say syllables and don't
pretend you're some sort of diphthong lord
you like saying diphthong don't you
almost as much as you hate saying c-----
and it's not even the correct term

Also how are you stressing the
con and the dom?
give them equal weight, or go all out on the CON
and then a brief and apologetic dum

        CON CON CON
        dum dum dom

It's a small thing but it popped
into what is left of my mind so
I just had to share it

While we're on the subject, there
is a four letter word beginning with F
that I also can't bear to say
    - he's so refined, like some
    Downton Abbey yourladyship
and it isn't even f---