Tag: Miguel Antonio Lizada

It is the moon’s urbane hour—
the period for prism play,
and sidewalk vigil.
The bay tonight is a carpet,
creased by the warm west wind,
black, crayon crimson and yellow.
I sit on the steps, with a paper bag
of syruped sticked fruits, while you,
angle adept, contour the moments.
I watch you fade into the crowd of clicks
and ice cream cones. Fireworks balloon
and pop in the night sky.
You emerge from the flurry of laughs,
with a scarfed smile to show me
your harvest of colors.
In the roll of my mind,
I harbor outtakes of you,
undeveloped, paparazzi raw:
Cotton-gloved fingers by the docks
of the browning hills
in the crips of autumn.
Palms clasped in prayer after washing
the golden god of a birth day
in the bricked spirits of a temple.
Broad shoulders bronzing
in the noontime sun,
the sea shelling you in…
We return to the hostel,
doubling back to our double deck
selves.
I pillow my head, close my eyes
and replay tonight’s scene,
this time, in reel time:
the indigo wash of the bay,
our bodies head to toe,
blurring the crowd,
a stranger’s hand snapping
a portrait of two sailing smiles
in an open harbor.

—
Miguel Antonio Lizada grew up in Davao City and teaches English language and literature at the Ateneo de Manila University. He was a fellow of the 54th Silliman University Writers Workshop. His essay “The Bangkok Masseur” won a Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award.

And sometimes, you just feel it
because quickness, the twin of youth
can turn dark. It may come
like that. A sentence, then the period,

then space and suddenly, for a moment, your life
finds full form, in paragraphs on another paper:
you were good. Yes, you were good.
Goodness at this point is a genre,
the template of remembering.

Oh but see the body still. The body,
the body is a living book of the dead:
your cells, the syllables of generations.

So I tell you now what grief is:

a sentence forcing the spine to snap
a book shut, before it’s passed on, held
by handshakes, read out loud

by a kiss.

—-
Migoy Lizada is finishing his graduate studies at the National University of Singapore.

I wish to live with you on a planet
at the edge of the universe. Earthly
houses, their pestilence of weed and gnome
have tired me. I wish to uproot
myself from them as quickly as I would mute
the screens of this black and white world
of Di Caprio and Winslet. Titanic
towers and princesses – the same entrapment,
the same frame, the graven
images we are meant to idolize.
I wish to live with you on a planet
at the edge of the universe. Where we constellate
the zodiac of our fates
and the geography of our feet.
And the Sun? The Sun will be an alien,
a distant star we shall point out one night
and say: It took billions of years for that light
to reach us. The Sun must be dead by now.
I wish to live with you on a planet
at the edge of the universe.
And there, where strange is now home
I can finally say to you this, this, this:
Only in your hands, stellar yet familiar, light
hands will I dissolve
and die.

Continue reading Science Fiction

You are a bag
of scented
and bleached
habits,
shuttled down
the corridors
of the city
to a different floor
in this condominium
of your choices.

Empty your pockets then
for a currency of new faces
and a handkerchief
to ball up words
ought not to be said.

Continue reading Lessons in Immigration