I’m alive and I have an appetite/ for longing.

For a second, I imagine how it feels to inhabit a body people desire like gold.

Kakolór pati kan álang na tulang nin tawó / an pigrunot na bagás asín ginibong puto. |
Especially when you notice the rice flour / that she uses is the color of human bone.

where, fifty, years, earlier, lolo, learned, engineering

My arms ache/ in the cereal aisle.

you choose to put yourself beneath its flag

I once lost my name in a pyre

“Ringu (1998)” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)”

their oceanic smell that screams where they come from instead of where they are carried to

I could make it alone
but I don’t want to.

映 with a skinny sun radical and 其 a pronoun/ pointing to who knows what.

What if he just said the bird waited forever to alight.

I am the world inside/ of every persimmon

Joy is impossible to fake, they say.

I am trying to imagine my new life when I am returned to the place of my parents’ birth.

Now it’s raining and I’m sixteen and unlicensed.

There are few men who will communicate with you in all the languages you know.

I have built my new tongue from old corpses.

As if it were instinct, you held tightly
to a slim bar of sunlight

Turns out it, too, wanted
to know more than what the body can do.