Kartika_Issue15

piece suit nearest the air conditioner indifferent to statues and elusive
beacons because this is the minor league and my own companion anticipates
VISA to Italy and a salary remitted to parents raising grandson her continued
tenure ligation makes possible - My mother is the youngest of eight in the
archipelago there is not lack of barrenness in this business there are no babes
- Gravidity is obsolescence - So we are watching the twin audition their legs
like drumsticks I do not follow drumstick legs the disco ball mutes parody
my rival smokes a thick cigar I can lose a bidding war of what is
impregnable –
and I look at the leg bones, defleshed.
We tacitly agree to our uncanny pairing no economic forecast could
predictonly in Olongapo where remanded to the system daughters not good
for the soil or the laundry - I want the familiarity of her mouth again to
expect her tongue I want to trace her legs as geometrically defined by nylon
but when a guest relations officer is removed from the club she discards
uniform and invisibly armored in designer blue jeans and simple blouse the
transformer outside the hotel erupts in the storm in the blackout because no
money exchanged we hold each other clothed instead I do not want to lose
her again in the darkness I study her face her tattooed brow that draws me in
to study her eyes the alluvial depositions of Zambal volcanic streams the
cousin choosing to kneel beside me in the river? the American returned
from several thousand miles to bury grandfather I was 10 years old meeting
my supposed barkada in the shallows we received the cross on the forehead
saliva of the dead.
Sean Labrador y Manzano lives on the island off the coast of Oakland. He edits the
anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. His chapbook, The Gulag
Arkipelago is published by Tinfish. Recent writing appears in Aufgabe, Eleven
Eleven, Generations, Conversations at a Wartime Café
(http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Volt, The
Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The
Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/seanlabrador-y-manzano.html)
and else where.
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