“The Father Gene” and Other Poems
“The Father Gene” and Other Poems
By Jose Luis Pablo
When Pantone Chose the 2019 Color of the Year
They picked living coral in a fit of wishful thinking.
Perhaps the enthusiastic descendant of rose quartz
could be an imagining of the animal
apart from rumor or legend.
Warmth of rock,
it calls to mind communal suns of scaled satellites,
and how life radiates to the naked eye.
Think the sea’s daring skeletons as proof of life.
Blush of ocean floor,
never meant to be the rash dulled to heal,
too late we remember you
bleached dynamite powder.
Mythological hue,
with which we dye our papers and fabrics,
we paint in remembrance.
We paint your eulogy.
I’d Rather Identify as the Goddess of Fungi
at the party, i try to quote judith butler and say gender is a performance i’ve never been super good at. i tell them i have been dreaming about becoming a chandelier instead.
—Derek Berry
Decompose my male body
& roll out the carpet for my ascension.
Every itch, angry rash, & strange patch
that’s stopped me from sleeping with strangers
will bubble like a frog’s proud underneck
& crust into serpentine jewels.
Sissy garments buried with this shamed corpse
will mold
& from detritus, finery.
Threads from my bell sleeves, flared hems, & ruffled panels
will decay to become hyphae woven
into silk & brocade.
Once adorned, I will strike
through the closet of dirt,
sudden & stalk-like,
with the humility of the mushroom forgotten.
I will invade the skies with
storm clouds & galaxies
of spore. The eruption of color
I bleached in life
will spring
free from the mortal coil.
My sibilant voice will wake the mycelial chorus
& thunder through the forests.
Any organism
that has ever lived will raise its solemn skull
& echo
my ethereal & earthen song.
The kingdom of man wanted me dead as a
secret.
Didn’t they know I would still inherit the earth?
The Father Gene
These nights my father curls beside me. In sleep,
he is even more fetal – hairless pile of collapsed limbs,
molar grinds, forehead furrows, eyes wrenched shut
in some pain even dreams bring.
Awake, he will be a stutter,
a mouth relearning to string the alphabet,
legs relearning to tread land without scarring it,
a mind that takes too many detours in grocery aisles.
No longer do I distinguish between metaphor and
memory
to walk with him daily into the mind’s fog
with only images to stand in as light
houses:
A crimson ribbon around his wrist,
tethered to his granddaughters holding hands
at Walden Pond across the world, turned target
for invaders and their heavy boots on DNA’s beach
reclaiming the precious land when he turns sixty,
punishing the reach of his life and his immortality
now that some part of him will live on;
staircases as mountains, dizzying height echoing times
I cannot remember like him throwing me in the air
(what a shriek I must have released, what joy
I must have had, not to know what falling was
or the rubble of words we can leave across the dinner table);
a child on the sidewalk opening her mouth
to conjure up a storm. Her father rubs her back,
not minding the bits of hotdog and rice
sliming his shoes because suddenly he is a tree
rooted in the mess, taking nourishment from the sick;
mercy of fathers passed down as gene
so I can look at every man who stays
and my father never dies.
In Pursuit of Beauty
Words are just
shadows
playing in a field
until they lose their way home.
Waiting at the cave, we accost them with chains.
How many have used
water or tree or bird or world or home
to mean something else?
Beauty—
she was too much to bear
so we stifled her in our narrow language,
chipped at her with tools.
Each passing tribe
gashed its mark on her face.
No sage quill can teach
me how to hold up her missing skein.
Still I write
water tree bird world home
and I am writing not to kill what’s left of her.
Jose Luis Pablo or "Nico" is a poet and a communications manager for a non-profit. Their work has been published in Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, Cordite Poetry Review (Australia), My Gay Eye (Germany), Busilak: New LGBTQ+ poetry from the Philippines (University of the Philippines Press), The Pinch (USA), and elsewhere, as detailed in joseluisbpablo.wordpress.com. Nico was awarded by the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2020 Peseroff Poetry Prize. They are based in Rizal, Philippines.
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