“Call It Talisman (If You Must)” was inspired by the indigenous tattoo revival of the Tatak ng Apat na Alon Tribe, and anthropologist Ikin Salvador’s “Signs on Skin: Beauty and Being: Traditional Tattoos and Tooth Blackening among the Philippine Cordillera” exhibit and talk at Pusod in Berkeley, October 2004. In one photograph, a group of newly tattooed, young Ilubo warriors posed in traditional headdresses and loincloths for a portrait in 1949. Their rite of passage (for which they were inked) was the killing of invading Japanese soldiers. The Ilubo were traditionally headhunters.

“Eve Speaks 2” borrows the line “One by one the stars go out” from Tu Fu’s “A Restless Night in Camp.”

“Having Been Cast, Eve Implores 2” was written after Jennifer K. Sweeney’s Salt Memory (Main Street Rag).

“Medicine Song” was written after the All Nations Drum Group performance at UC Berkeley’s 2009 Flor y Canto.

“Aswang” was written after Rachelle Cruz’s currently unpublished poetry collection, Ascela at the World’s Greatest Fair, and Vince Gotera’s “Aswang.” Anthropologist Alicia Magos has written that in an effort to spread Catholicism in the Philippines, the early Spanish Catholic clerics maligned the “pagan and demonic” indigenous women priests by calling them Aswang, a god of evil. “It was a perfect religious-military tool for conquering other cultures. Through time, the term aswang was invented and its description became more morbid and cruel as generations passed these fabricated stories.” The aswang is now known as a mythical creature that uses her long, thin tongue to suck babies out of their mothers’ wombs.

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems have previously appeared, some in earlier versions: 2nd Avenue Poetry, Action Yes, Amerarcana, Boxcar Poetry Review, Crate, The Drunken Boat, Fairy Tale Review, In Our Own Words, In the Grove, MiPOesias, New American Writing, Notre Dame Review, Octopus Magazine, Pacific Review, Poets & Artists, Tinfish, Versal, Womb Poetry, Word Riot, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Zoland Poetry, and in the anthology Field of Mirrors (San Francisco: PAWA, Inc., 2008).

Thank you to my husband and partner Oscar Bermeo. Thank you Maxine Chernoff, Stacy Doris, and Jaime Jacinto; to Francisco Aragón, Tara Betts, Peter Conners, Rigoberto González, Wayne Hangad, Lee Herrick, Javier O. Huerta, Craig Santos Perez, Jennifer Reimer, Matthew Shenoda, Evie Shockley, Stephen Hong Sohn, Truong Tran, Sunny Vergara, Rich Villar, Thom Ward, and Bryan Thao Worra. Salamat at Dios ti Agngina to Gina Apostol, Rick Barot, Terry Bautista, Vangie Buell, Nick Carbó, Rachelle Cruz, Oliver de la Paz, M. Evelina Galang, Sarah Gambito, Vince Gotera, Luisa Igloria, Paolo Javier, Joseph O. Legaspi, Edwin A. Lozada, Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jon Pineda, Bino A. Realuyo, Al Robles (RIP), Tony Robles, Patrick Rosal, Anthem Salgado, Lara Stapleton, Leny Mendoza Strobel, Eileen R. Tabios, Jean Vengua, and Marianne Villanueva.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR