Vigilante

Play by | May 18, 2014

vigilanteTauhan:

Jaime Villareal, 19
Bobot, 32
Alfonso Almeda, 27

Pook: Isang kanto sa baryo na malapit sa bahay ni Alfonso

{Music}

(Nakaupo si Jaime at Bobot sa harap ng isang maliit na mesa. Kararating lang ni Jaime na may dalang tasang may kape, habang si Bobot ay umiinom mula sa isang bote ng alak.)

BOBOT: Hoy, ano sa tingin mo ang ginagawa mo, bata?

JAIME: (nininerbyos) Ah, nagkakape po.

BOBOT: Bata, mas lalo ka lang ninerbyosin sa kape. Teka, ikukuha kita ng isa pang bote. Di naman malayo yung karinderya. (Magsisimulang tumayo si Bobot.)

JAIME: Ah, huwag na po, Sir. Okay na ako. Sanay naman ako na magkape kapag kinakabahan, tulad na lang kapag nag-re-review ako para sa exam.

BOBOT: Aha! Iyan ang gusto ko! Parang exam lang nga ang gagawin natin ngayon. Hep, hep, ako ang ga-grado sa iyo, kaya pagbutihan mo, Jaime..Jaime ano? (Tatango si Jaime.)

BOBOT: Teka, bata, talagang nakapag-aral ka?

JAIME: Nakapagtapos po ako ng haiskul. Tapos kurso sa TESDA, computer hardware repair.

BOBOT: Ah, wow! Ang talino mo pala talaga! Pero alam kong kinakabahan ka. Chill ka lang! Kaya nga nagkukuwentuhan tayo ngayon. Ito talaga ginagawa ng mga boys bago ang gig. Di ka ba sinabihan ni Anton tungkol sa SOP namin? (Tatawa si Bobot habang sinusuri ni Jaime ang paligid.)

JAIME: Di po ba parang medyo malakas ang boses nin— . . . Mga boses natin?

BOBOT: Yun nga! Pagsususpetsahan tayo kung para tayong mga patay na nakatambay at di nag-iimikan. SOP namin yan. Magkuwentuhan. Mag-inuman. Parang wala lang. Plus, mas mare-relax ka pa kung ganito, chill ka lang bata. Sigurado kang ayaw mo? (Iaalok ni Bobot ang kanyang bote.)

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The Queen's Library

Poetry by | May 11, 2014

if it hadn’t been for the books
thrown about by the stairs
I wouldn’t have noticed
how with each purchase
she revealed herself
one on top of the other
covers pressed upon covers
titles lost upon genres
“The Color Purple”
casting shades of “Black and Blue”
on some oriental “La Bete Humaine”
as “Madame Bovary” vanishes to “Sleep”
with Murakami’s elephants
her majesty has yet again
leafed through the truths
of her characters
flung about in the pages
one would dare ask how the King
gets by with such a collection
but would not dare question why
her bookshelves haven’t been built

—
Margaux Denice Garcia has been a fellow to the Davao Writers Workshop. She teaches literature at the Ateneo de Davao University.

She Had Her Way

Nonfiction by | May 11, 2014

April 1 was my mother’s first day in the hospital. My mother could still talk and she could still move around but she kept feeling pain in her legs. She still had her dialysis, which was already part of her routine since she had her stroke. The doctors advised us that my mother’s legs needed to be amputated because they were starting to create pus that was going into her blood stream. She was then moved to the ICU because there were already complications in her body and she needed to be watched over very carefully. My family talked about the decision and we decided that both legs should be cut off. The doctors had to take away the source of the pus so that they could easily clean my mother’s blood by dialysis. But the doctors were having problems because they couldn’t do the operation as my mother was starting to weaken and they had to operate on her immediately. But before that, they needed bags of blood for the dialysis. We couldn’t get enough blood in the city so my sister Elaine, my brother Elmer, and his wife Cora had to travel all the way to Tagum City just to get blood.

When I saw my mother after the operation, I couldn’t help but cry because she had become noticeably smaller because of the amputation. We tried to lighten the mood around her, telling her that she could still have new legs. My mother just smiled. She wanted to see her legs but hospital procedure wouldn’t let her see them.

On the 8th of April, my mother had her last dialysis. Continue reading She Had Her Way

This is How to Talk to a Stranger

Nonfiction by | May 4, 2014

Talk to a StrangerYou are seventeen.

In the Bachelor Bus from Tagum, third to the last two-seat row, you are seated behind a man in his late 60s. He says something, but his breath that smells like he hasn’t been brushing his teeth for several days now disturbs you.

He says it again: Kamusta ka? (How are you?)

The utterance of the two-word Tagalog greeting signals a sincere effort. You can’t decide whether he has a British or American accent. It is somewhat a combination of both. His face doesn’t help you recognize his nationality either, just the prominent nose at least. You look at him more closely as if to help you assess. He is a tall man. You can tell by how his feet struggle with his black back pack on it in the space given on the rest. He tries to move his legs once in a while. He wears a black beret, a yellow polo shirt, checkered Bermuda shorts, and black sandals. Quite a color combination, you think.

As if willing to play against your ignorance, he greets you again with a more obvious effort. You find it hard to resist the charm of his eagerness to start a conversation when he displays a smile that reveals a white set of teeth. You wonder why he has bad breath.

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The Savior

Fiction by | April 26, 2014

Three months left. That was all. And it was not even a whole three months. It was two months and twenty nine days. He had been counting. Every morning, since that visit to the doctor, he had been counting. And tomorrow, it would just be two months and twenty eight days. And then, in the end, he would have to leave his son. Alone. There was clearly nothing left to do, but pray. And cry.

They were on a bus, his son and himself, going no place in particular, on the sunniest of spring days. The boy almost looked normal, except that his eyes seemed a little uncoordinated, somewhat unfocused. But you had to look at him closely to notice. The way he acted, however, gave his condition away. He looked ten, perhaps eleven, but he was most decidedly too childlike for his age. “Fire truck!” he would say, identifying the red vehicle parked in its station. “Dog!” he exclaimed, pointing at a morning jogger’s pet on a leash. “Flag!” he said, looking up at a waiving banner, glancing at his father for reassurance and acknowledgement that he had identified correctly.

The boy had his father’s visage. Lines and wrinkles on the older man’s face camouflaged the similarity, but the boy’s eyes whispered of his father’s. Assenting with a nod and a smile, the father thought back to a moment just half a year ago, when all hope was snatched from him.

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Hope

Poetry by | April 26, 2014

Hope
it flows in a running stream,
scintillating under the sun
like a vein of liquid treasure.
You can barely cup it with your palms
as it only drips from your fingers,
But the coolness of it
makes you smile.
You take some into plastic bottles,
and share it with the nearby sun-baked children,
sweating as they toil the earth and mud.
They drink Hope,
not a drop escaping their lips,
and they smile.
And you smile too,
because you understand completely
their experience.

—
Glyd Jun Arañes works as a research assistant at the Philippine Women’s College of Davao. This poem is dedicated to the refugees in Ban Mae Surin, Thailand.

Semana Santa

Poetry by | April 26, 2014

Yes, there is stillness in darkness, for there is
beauty in light. Yesterday, the world showed me
its wound in the chest of a homeless child, drenched
with rain, begging for crumbs outside the door
of the ancient cathedral, where we converge
and pray on what can never be, whenever we try
to pull the rusty nails from our palms. And there
is grief, for there is always loss, in life. Every morning,
during holy week around 8 am, after a mug of coffee,
the maya birds stop over my balcony to sing a song
I could never ever decipher. And that is a miracle
by itself. Of knowing there are limits. Sometimes
there is a sentiment of defeat at the peak of triumph.
Sometimes, I seek god, in the twirling smoke
of every cigarette I consume, while I wait
with awe for the sky to be filled with stars.

—
Simon Anton Nino Diego Baena is an undergraduate student of MSU-IIT, Iligan city. Originally from Bais, Negros Oriental, now based in Iligan. Some of his poems have already been published in the Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic magazine, and Eastlit online literary journal, the upcoming issue 17 of Kartika review, ODDproyekto, and Kabisdak online.

Instrumental

Poetry by | April 26, 2014

Instrumental
Our room gets smaller,
walls wanting to embrace each other
pouting every detail of that wallpaper as if to kiss
or crumple the silences in between
or fold it, neatly as if origami beds and chairs
dreaming to fly with cranes and paper planes
out your window–
your every breath reminds me how
suffocated words want to escape and be born again
with voices, to speak up the reasons why
this room is getting smaller,
why this room has no more music
only lullabies slowly repeating each goodbyes
so slowly that I can spell it out
with the lyrics of an empty love song.

—
Jermafe Kae Angelo-Prias is a graduate of Creative Writing in University of the Philippines Mindanao. She was a fellow at the 2012 Iligan National Writers workshop and 2005 Davao Writers Workshop. Some of her works have appeared in SunStar Davao and the Best of Dagmay anthology.