In the back of Sir Mojamel’s classroom
I was ten fingers and four
if I count it right
there was a tree,
if it existed at all, I may be wrong but
one thing I hold is this:
why the big acacia tree
doesn’t bloom the same way
scorpions molt
underneath its bark anymore?
I asked my brother and he said
breathing a memory:
“Mana daman kayu lu”
the flowers once white,
sifted tufts opening against the heat.
why is nostalgia
the easiest to come back to
and the hardest thing
to forget?
maybe the only thing left of this
is my inching away to the body—
my body, the grammar lessons.
Sir Mojamel’s distant classroom,
where the hurt lingers best,
like a scab of wound coercing into an itch
you could never scratch enough.
but I could be wrong.
Aleah Sulaiman Bantas, 20, is a Maguindanaon writer and is currently pursuing Bachelor of Secondary Education Major in Social Studies at the University of Southern Mindanao. A creative nonfiction fellow at the 2025 SOX Writers Workshop, her work has also appeared in the Bangsamoro Literary Review. She writes about love, queerness, memory, and the shared struggles of the masses, drawing from both her cultural roots and contemporary realities.