Christopher Santiago
Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, selected by A. Van Jordan as the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, and a finalist for the 2017 Minnesota Book Award. A 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, his poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. Say Home, a collaboration with composer Lembit Beecher, received its world premiere by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in February 2019. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas where he teaches creative writing and Asian American literature.
A Restaurant in Makati
The stink of patîs & vinegar must make
the blind mariachis blinder.
They belt anyway: harmonies
stacked & strummed on steel-
strung chords, charro-svelte, except
for the bass player, who might be
a nesting doll for a native god.
It’s a fashionable neighborhood
with even an Hermés
patrolled by a guard slung with a grin
& an AK-47. We eat with our hands
kamayan style—innards & knuckles, bone
hole, kare-kare, sizzling sisig—
my uncle, the dissident
turned capitalist, & me, a backpacker
afraid of the ice. God only knows
is what they sing & dahil sa iyo &
上を向いて 歩こう—whatever
the currency calls for. Praised
& paid, they shuffle out in single file
the blind leading
the ostensibly blind & I wonder
why this fear I’m being conned?
Even the harelipped boy
the day before outside the KFC—
the way he’d chanted out his hands.
Had his own mother
maimed him so we’d give
what little we gave? On warmed
towels we wipe our hands, before
my uncle takes me back
to the terminal, before he asks if I’ve got any yen to spare
for his schemes & he peels
out into the lawless traffic
through which the mariachis wade to
the spaces they’ve hollowed out
or leaned against someone else’s, doffing
the accoutrements of mariachi
becoming in sleep indistinguishable from
all that isn’t blind.
Ibong Adarna
The Ibong Adarna: a bird, Rose explains in delicate
English, that a dying king sends his sons into the forest
to capture: its song can make him young again. It lulls
the sons to sleep & with its droppings turns each to
stone.
Rose can’t believe I’ve never heard it—it’s as basic as
bread or Coke. We’ve just met. We’re related somehow; blood.
The father gets worse. He doesn’t want the youngest to follow but of course the son goes anyway: takes a flute. Some coins. A knife. The jungle presses down
until he feels a dream coming on — grey shores —
gulls —
but he shakes it off — sleep’s whole note & thrall —
by gouging his arm with the knife, by dousing the
wounds with calamansi. (A hybrid of citrus &
fortunella. Like lime but sweeter. More delicate).
The scars on my arm make her think of it: spaced
like a tally; a guardian angel’s. She waits for the host
to call our name. Silence is easy: from Manila to
Kalibo, I kept my mouth shut to pass — on buses,
jeepneys, ferries — though the next passenger
could’ve been kin.
The first time I came to these islands, I chased my
older cousins down to the trees. I was three; Rose
hadn’t been born. Funeral clothes—for our lolo —
mud. We chucked rocks & sticks at some monkeys
until one scraped me up to its jaws—
Aunts rushed out a door &
carried me to the next town
—strangers fitted a mask to my—a white-
hot sprouting below my shoulder like the first limb
of a new body—
Neither Rose nor her
mother recalls if the boy saves his brothers, if some countermelody turns them back to meat, if their napes
still green with moss. We eat. Something at the table
takes root in me, begins to knot me up like poison.
I will fold & unfold all night & dream the islands I
passed through to get here:
The island of clove smoke & metallophones; the one
with houses made of rain; the twenty dollars out of
each paycheck I plan to set aside so Rose & her
mother can rely that much less on the father who will
never come home—
the father, queued up at a window in Abu Dhabi,
chewing on a pencil, clutching what might be a race-
day program, a remittance form. I pay for parking
tickets, overdraft fees, a son, and then another, & in
between a stillness. I send no money abroad.
The boy catches the bird & his father spends the rest of his days devising notation. Or, the bird takes pity on the boy & goes into the cage to stop the damage. Or the boy has three sons of his own who suffer from insomnia & tinnitus. He lets the bird go & the bird turns him into an island covered with forests—