Two Poems by Leon Barros

“U.S. Pacific Fleet” (Flickr)

The Lowlanders

I

Each night our heads bow in inanition / see us
Supplicant to anyone who will hear us

I wonder what my ancestors gave for a name
What coin or meat / what sacks of grain tilled by us

The city beneath us made of ghosts & bamboo ash
Up in the boondocks I hear the gods keep their names / not us

Down here in the lowlands / names like hands 
Only hold on to what can be carried / what ends us

Here is the blood / & the soot / & the trees
& the drowning rain which endlessly gives us

The banks on which many strange men are always shoring
Their cargo of strange seeds / sickness / wealth / words / us

The footprints changing in shape / trampled over
Weaving formless pattern until you can’t tell us

One language for the other / obscure what origin
Of spice or fruit / each year returns wild to nourish us

When the river starts to poison / why did you stay
When ritual or prayer / abjured us to us

To understand your place in the world / divide history
Into pre & post / ache to restore primordial version of us

Us nameless given names not ours / our giving
Names / us falling / to not / to knot / to naught us


II

Each year I am buried / the giving rain / the sulphureous
air / the wind-felled trees / sampaguita I have laid on us

For my father / & my mother’s mother
& my mother / & my father’s mother / find us

Dying in the lowlands / the dead women
I am named after / & what they gave us

I wonder what my ancestors worried for dinner / which nights
They made sure their children ate / which vegetables to provide us

Sub chayote for green papaya / spinach for kangkong 
Skinned & boiled / you can almost mistake us

I don’t know what it took to stay / the dead river
Choking on the water hyacinth / which purifies us

Collect its stalks to dry / weave baskets 
Shoes / Christmas lanterns / rope for us

To hold onto / trinket / ground / line against death
To stave off dirge-myth / called into us / so recall us

The clay house we dredge / with each rain tides away
A circlet of leaving / twined / & what returns us

I call my aunties for their stories / their sureties
Call my uncle for the adobo recipe he feeds us

One-part toyo / one-part suka / one-part water
Peppercorns / bay leaves / & so much garlic / & us

Hungry for it / through every lifetime / the nameless
flight / listen, Leon—I fail to see how it’s not all us

Boondock Codex1

 

Contributors’ Bio
 

Leon Barros (he/they) is a Filipino poet, editor, and a first-generation immigrant. They received their BA in English, with a minor in Creative Writing at UC Berkeley. Their work has been featured in The Daily Cal, HOLD: A Journal, and is forthcoming in beestung and Call Me [Brackets]. You may find them at leonbarros.wordpress.com.

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