During the war, the old women would still go outside the house to smoke their hand-rolled tobacco after cleaning the suppertime dishes. But so the Japanese soldiers would not see them, they learned to flip their cigarettes with the lit ends inside their mouths. They flipped their cigarettes with their tongues so fast, and we kids would try to copy them. We burned our own tongues trying. Lola Ilang used to do this, and I tried to copy her. It hurt! It hurt so much when I burned my tongue! Yes, Lola Ilang used to cook the best pochero, and foreigners thought it was a little weird, to cook banana with bok choy. You use the saba banana. No other kind is sweet enough. Do you know, when she died, everyone had already forgotten how old she was? We asked her some years ago, and even she had forgotten. But I was saying about the war. No, the women did not want the soldiers to find them. You know what the soldiers did to the women here. The Japanese buried so much gold in our hills. This is because our northernmost provinces were the last places they set foot before their ships left, after their emperor surrendered. They stole this gold, Spanish gold, from our churches. You know, not too long ago, some of the Japanese who had gone into hiding were found in the hills. They were so old. They never knew how the war ended.

PANANAGHOY

PANANAGHOY

Ay, ay!

Bodies disassembled in church courtyards, mango blossom boughs knotted, hewn from roots with dull blades. The moon was blood, and sometimes she’d close her eyes. Sometimes so much poetry, prayers on the parched lips of dying men, forced her to hide. Even the barest trees were always good for hiding, and solitary herons’ wings swift slicing through cloud. How they’d lacerate sky, and how sky bled, bending in arcs and wisps after the bombs fell. The stillness terrified us all. And those very veiled women who prayed with rose-scented rosaries opened their legs for so little rice and fish. Yes, this, I saw. And with my own eyes, this I see still.

Ay, ay!

PASIG

PASIG

The spirits no longer bathe here, though in moonlight, my eyes trick me sometimes, and I think it is the weeping tree I see, seducing dream-filled dissidents. Their young bloated bodies sleep in the riverbed and greet me as they surface.

Tell me, why would the diwata visit this dead, filthy place, to make a home among its broken things, to drink its filthy water, to breathe its acrid air?

No, there is no more reason for her to return. We may as well fill it with mud and forget, for there is nothing but wordless burial here. And no one who will say grace.

HOW I NO LONGER BELIEVE IN PIOUS WOMEN

HOW I NO LONGER BELIEVE IN PIOUS WOMEN