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Pristine
By Kelechi Ohale
Subzero winter air. Caught in my throat as I yawn.
In my bones exhausted. But I will walk. I will walk from the unfamiliar parking garage.
To the third floor, witness empty classrooms, stare at wings,
my wings, and I will walk up and down again in these shoes
breaking them in, familiarize myself with the feeling, this pain will dull
as my feet mold
my big toe won’t bruise in the creases of these shoes,
never again.
I say. For the umpteenth time.
This place is my home,
these shoes, a conduit.
This too shall pass, no?
BUOTAN — A BISAYA WORD
By Jamie Lu
My mother refers to
people she holds in high esteem
as “buotan,”
one of many Bisaya words
whose meaning I never knew with certainty
but instead inferred
from the lilt in her voice,
the emphatic nod of her head when
she spoke.
Perhaps to ensure my assimilative
triumph, my parents elected
not to teach me Bisaya in any direct manner,
but stubbornly,
I came to understand it anyway,
if not explicitly,
then at least intrinsically,
as if the words had been sewn
into the tunnels of my ears,
an unfinished tapestry that
stopped just short of my mouth.
Your friend, I like her. She’s buotan,
said my mother,
and I knew that to be held in high esteem,
I should be buotan as well.
And by buotan,
I assumed she meant intelligent,
well-spoken, civilized, clever —
all of which I determined
myself to be.
My inability to speak
the language rendered me a silent
but observant child,
and for a time my relatives operated
under the assumption that I was not privy
to the content of their conversations —
and yet, I listened,
an infiltrator,
crouched beneath the bamboo-wood
table of my heritage,
catching whatever scraps fell into
my open mouth.
And meanwhile knowledge and understanding
bloomed under my tongue,
behind my eyes,
a field of sampaguita filling
my head with a fragrance entirely mine,
entirely unprecedented,
new and invisible.
I was given one thousand denominations,
each synonyms for torn-down-the-middle:
translator,
interpreter,
girl-made-guide through
the American concrete jungle,
first daughter,
capable daughter,
Ate — older sister.
Looking back, I forgive myself
for thinking I was infallible,
for assuming ‘clever’ was all
I ever had to be.
Superior, unblemished —
the good kind,
the transformed kind,
the patriot convert birthed straight
from the forehead of Liberty.
Hands uncalloused by the rice field,
skin uncaramelized by the sun.
Wise Ate, woman bridge,
a mind steeped in history,
an eye trained on the dawning, fiery future.
Then, one day, I learned that
buotan means kind
and now, I do not feel so clean.
I have been digging and I am made of dirt,
stolen soot under my fingernails,
excavating minerals
instead of aquifers
amidst the worst drought of my life.
Now, my body aches from
all this contorting, this
shaving off my own flesh
to fit through
the mirage of a keyhole.
I want to cradle my
past self and shake out the things
rattling within her,
the petals and the scraps and the industrial-grade
bridge trusses and bolts, and say,
You are kind, you are kind.
Be that before anything else.
Be girl, be complete and dark,
and do not beg to be washed clean.
Know the tapestry unfolds and ripples through your entire body.
Know you need not impress to be loved.
Know the fragrance of the sampaguitas carries you forward,
upward.
Know your goodness is enough.
