A popular question in architecture school is about the purpose
of a roof deck. And like any other examination, none of the options
look wrong. The tip is to find the best answer, not the correct
one. Some would opt for amenities, like an elevated pool, with nothing
to cover the head from the metropolitan microclimate—the morning
smog, wind tunnels, all the range of albedo. Some would choose
utilities, a place to dry the laundry, water tanks, or exhaust.
But no, the answer is lingering—on a future
expansion, in a parapet where gable trusses should rest,
as if nothing will ever be permanent. My room is an afterthought—
an attic reconstructed to have ample space for a person
to sleep in, without any regard for insulation. Galvanized
iron sheet, structural wood, then my melting
body realizing it doesn’t belong in a space meant for storing
forgotten furniture and boxes of broken things.
There’s a small window I can crawl out of when I want
to smoke. Or look at the underwear model on a billboard
sitting on top of flat concrete. I didn’t really notice
that on street level you wouldn’t be able to see
columns and rebars extending over the building’s apex
I presume because of the facade and all the ornamentation within
a skilled mason’s arsenal. And the paint so bright
as if shame doesn’t exist in a country with people
as indecisive as the weather. Where to hope is neither right
nor wrong but more valuable than waterproofing or a pitched roof.
So maybe advertising was the best answer all along.

———

Like Noah on the ark I take inventory of every paired thing I see—

Two doors, like valves, that lead to the exterior:
one to the communal hall of the apartment building,
another to the outside, a rickety porch;
open air, which, lately, has also become communal.

Two other doors, like curtains, that partition
interiority, cleave one domestic function from the other:
bathing, sleeping; eating, living.

Two plants, one plastic. Two garbage bins.

Two clocks, both broken.

(Rather, one with the batteries expired, and no urgency
to know the time of day these days.
One dented beyond empathy.)

Two sinks, one porcelain, one metal; both
to wash two kinds of blood in.

I know there are paired things outside the walls of this apartment.
I imagine two street lamps, the coupled lakes, imperfect lovers.

At one point, my world began to end where the communal began,
which, I fear, is the most American I’ve become yet.

Two pots agape on the stove.

Two portraits, one of my favorite folk singer,
another a reproduction of this 19th-century painting of a Javanese woman,
which I stole from a library book last year, tore her page clean off,
a stowaway in my winter coat; us the only two brown people on the bus home.

The portrait’s painter was white.
Now we’re two orientalized caricatures assuring each other through the long year,
used to flood, used to insularity, our old countries—shared exercises in distance.

Two maps: Quezon City on the wall,
another buried deep in my gut, safer there than in my mind.

Two tables, one for meals, the other for work.

Two lamps of varying brightness.

The lone spider in the ceiling corner
twinned by light shining below it.

Two wooden chairs, one stacked with laundry
the weight of a small person.

Outside, it snows
communal culpability. Each brilliant speck its own
populated ark, crowded with data. I take
another inventory; cataloguing in binaries,

I mistype ark as arc. Surely this thing will end, like a year, like a regime.
Like residency. Like a signed lease.
Like a narrative where God had washed the earth enough,

and we crawl out of the vessel, picking tender
buds off the generous limbs of asymmetrical trees.

———

Memory: my grandmother’s house filled with the birds she kept for company

The mynah by her front door adept at saying yes, come in

The cockatoo by the hallway murmuring the Lord’s Prayer in her jaunty cadence

The parakeet in the living room replicating

Her laughter on the telephone

I haven’t called my family in weeks, it seems

The green dot by my name enough for them to know

I’m alive on the other side of the internet

Like Gatsby, my underwatered houseplants tease

I imagine their voices to be nasal and pinched, like underwatered houseplants

In elementary school, my teachers called me a “people person”

Because I always knew what to say to make somebody converse with me

I was reasonably popular because my friends sometimes recognized me on the radio

Some school nights we drove two hours to the business district to record commercials

Me in the backseat practicing accents

Baying like a beached seal

My Australian distinct from my New Zealander and impeccable at the age of 9

It was still my singing even when my friends did not recognize me on the radio

Like most parts of the body that cannot be touched, the human voice is malleable

Discipline: I gave my shame a face and smothered it with a pillow

Obedience: the pilea tuning its satellite dishes

To the frequency of the bright window

A teacher told me the function of poetry is to sing

A bird perches on the sill and sings and sings and sings

The pilea turns again to circumvent its shadow

My beddings return all the screams I’ve planted into them

poetry-magazineThe root of our shared word for “home” is “to be consoled”

The root of our shared word for “home” is “to be consoled”