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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—

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