Yvanna Vien Tica
Friday
Chicago is tinged glasslike
as I memorize its roads and billboards.
My childhood smokes and drifts off, a hazy picture,
and my father burrows into my mother to steal her
scent for when he shackles himself
to his desk of papers and his empty bed.
I can already imagine it—two shadowed rag dolls
imprisoned in the air. I’ll rub my red coat, and my mother
will thumb her ring, her fingers flinting its smooth edges.
Our minds will intertwine to fill all the empty spaces: a wedding
ring without its pair, the grandparents who gifted the red coat
so many goodbyes ago, and our hands busying themselves
with the glint of a ring and meshed fabric
traced over and over like scrapped rosaries.
Saturday
Manila at its best—all its children
bickering over right of ways. Traffic lanes buttered
with cars. Angled streetlights casting marked combs
of lashes over our cheeks. My mother hides
her pressed palms in the shadows, an automatic sign
of prayer, the car full of holy spaces
I wedge into. Outside, the exhaust catches
what smoothness of our throats remains,
and we smear our eyes with the night
to hide their leavened shapes.
Sunday
We visit the cemetery,
and in the car, we are languid: soft-tongued,
flickering eyes. When we arrive, the tombstones break the soil
like pockmarked teeth, and the red ants claim my coat
through bared pincers. The four of us shuffle between
each other. Funerals in Manila tear through its attendees
in a torrid wave, unlike those in Chicago where the winds rip the flowers
from our dry hands. Dear grandparents, forgive us
for being so late. Under the shade of a tree pricked
with husked branches, I watch my mother
as the wind stills, the bleating murmurs of traffic
cuffing her tears.
Yvanna Vien Tica
Originally published in Eunoia Review
Someone needs to tell him that the bells
of a cathedral somewhere have been pulled,
that there is a bird dashing out of its confines before the note cries
and wanders the air. That is to say, the boy inevitably elbows its way
into a man near the threshold. Someday he will learn what it means
to lay his head near the door, to beg the wood to turn
heartbeat at his voice. This is desperation, sticky with the unshaven
stubble of a sunset. But today
he will only learn what it means to shift the weight, the rite
of passage into a streaming wood of the unbloomed and unfastened
cherry petals. The mother standing at the door, her waving hands
certain and sculpted; the father repainting the house into a softer
man, one who mercies the threshold pliant so that when the boy
comes and crosses into a cathedral, the bell is never intrusive, no
birds rushing for an escape.
YVANNA VIEN TICA is a Filipina writer with a hearing impairment who grew up in Manila and a suburb near Chicago. A high school senior, she is the 2021 Hippocrates Young Poet and the winner of the 2021 1455 Teen Poetry Contest. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse Daily, Hobart, Strange Horizons, and Poet Lore, among others. She is an Executive Editor for Polyphony Lit, a Poetry Reader for Muzzle Magazine, and can be found thanking God for another day.