‘White Phosphorus’ and Other Poems
By Ana Morales
Piece, Philippines, c.1800s. Abacá stem fiber, 14-1/4 x 32-1/2 inches. Coll. of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Gift of Mrs. Mary Sloan Hess, wife of Col. L.T. Hess, 1937.
Image description: Black and white photograph of shimmering, semi-transparent, monchrome textile (landscape orientation).
White Phosphorus
under fingers and spots of mildew, beneath
kitchen counters and gaskets, across the street
you had your first kiss, above rusty electric
fans, alongside beached sea turtles and
cordoned off shores, within the grooves of
sleep lines on your cheek, before the next exit,
outside the jail cell, between my concave
breasts, of headlines and unprompted
opinions, with the kites that fly into clear glass,
through time and place, inside tetanus shots,
after it happened, on the piano fall board, down
the cul de sac where they shot the maid, in the
event of mass panic and demise, behind the
bathroom stall, during the sandlot basketball
game, by the clothesline, below stillwater,
around the idea that there’s an ‘us’ and a
‘them,’ beyond the burning field, amid dispersal
disguised as containment, at first inhale and
sputter and cough, upon realizing what could
not be undone, as they killed, without probable
cause, despite your family’s medical history,
since the last time we held hands, among the
living, towards the dying, to speak of this now
and believe, in disruption
Image alt text: The poem ‘White Phosphorus’, aligned in a centralized column of right-justified text.
Blouse (Camisa), Manila, Philippines, c.1800s. Linen on pineapple fiber, 12 x 45-1/2 inches. Coll. of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Gift of Eleanor Husted Leal, 1925.
Image description: Black and white photograph of embroidered, semi-transparent, wide-necked blouse with wide scalloped sleeves.
Stormclouds
The typhoon in summer
wastes no space. Window
grills welcome you with
open arms and open
wounds. You taste metal
through your toes, and
you charge it to stories—
some kind of epilepsy
that’s grounds for ex-
pulsion from ligaments
lining the underbelly
and pockets of acrobats.
They laugh and they
fly, determined to land on
swollen ankles, in search
for alleviation. Unname
the speech on the barbs
of your tongue. Describe
the tumble of shoelace
untied. Encounter the
armored truck as it
backfires chrome blood
cells. After the bodies
are snatched and carried
upstream, we will bestow
a worthy name for hysteric
wind. One of us is pre-
tending to collect stale
water for tomorrow. One
of us will amass faces to
remember when clouds
cover our eyes and ears. I
only ask you smell the
unsound in the stiff air.
Piece, Philippines, c.1800s. Pineapple fiber, 14-1/4 x 15-1/2 inches. Coll. of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Gift of Mrs. Mary Sloan Hess, wife of Col. L.T. Hess, 1937.
Image description: Black and white photograph of shimmering, semi-transparent, monchrome textile (square/vertical).
Resolve
I want to admire shrapnel from the moon. I want to jolt when I stick my fingers inside sockets. I want to persuade my father to skip with me in public spaces. I want to fall asleep as my dog laps at my hair. I want to peel soft-boiled eggs with blistered nails. I want to unmute my phone and revel in its silence. I want to walk barefoot in dreams and floodwater. I want to bite your shoulder and spit out birthday cake. I want to steal a sepia photograph of my great grandfather whom I never knew. I want to suture a wound I did not inflict. I want to dive into an ocean and drink my fill. I want to pick at the foreskin of computer monitors. I want to climb into a casket and pretend I was never alive. I want to count my white hair and convert it to experience. I want to sweep the dust from floors so I can lie down and not feel remorse. I want to down my mother’s bottle of perfume without the implication of why. I want to watch the dumpster burn itself, contained. I want to grope at lost causes but not without consequence. I want to comb through old letters and send them to myself. I want to dig up my dog’s grave and make sure he’s still there. I want to ask you how your day went and call it routine. I want to cauterize the language employed by all poems. I want to paint over the pores of orange peels and second-hand embarrassment. I want to tickle last month’s expenses with my uneven eyelashes. I want to wade through delirium but not for too long. I want to plant false memories in the soil of my parents’ garden. I want to scrub bathroom tiles. I want to brew day-old coffee. I want to write down dishonest lies. I want to deep fry bad first impressions and then pump them into my stomach. I want to embellish real stories for the sake of being interesting. I want to iron the gun that’s resting in the bureau drawer. I want to commute without my earphones or my thoughts. I want to accuse without hypocrisy. I want hypocrisy without moral suspicion. I want to wake up feeling like I actually slept. I want to go back to bed but only after I’ve made it. I want to bury my feet in sand while my sister swims towards the horizon. I want to bridge the chorus with the fade out. I want to be the things I always said I’d overcome. I want to tell a story and trust it listens. I want to sit in the quiet of lightbulbs and turnstiles. I want to only have to move when requested. I want to move only to not be someone’s inconvenience.
Ana Morales is a Filipino writer born in Cebu City and currently living in Pasig City. She graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing and a minor in Gender Studies from the Ateneo de Manila University. Her essays and poems have appeared in HEIGHTS Ateneo, Cordite Poetry Review, and Kritika Kultura. She works at the Ateneo de Manila University Press.
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In the 19th century Phillipines, diaphanous textiles woven from pineapple leaf fibers (piña) and banana plant fibers (abacá) were prized by fashionable society and would come to be collected by European and American ethnographers and tourists. The pineapple plant, which is native to Central and South America, was introduced to Asia in the 16th-century by the Portuguese and the Spanish; the fruits were sent to the Philippines by way of China. Woven textiles composed of fibers from abacá date from as early as the seventeenth-century. These lightweight fabrics were often woven into garments and intricately embroidered or covered in brocade. [Refs: https://philippinestudies.uk/mapping/tours/show/5 and https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/pineapple-panuelo]
In these three elemental poems, Ana Morales asks us “to speak of this now and believe, in disruption”.