Whenever I am away and a sharp longing
for Mother stabs at me, I would buy a stick
of cigarette, light it in the dark and watch the embers
chew it up. Pa used to sigh her name, “Anita, hay Anita,”
and crack in loving jest that her mouth’s a tunnel
for steam locomotives, to which she would laugh
a response in hot clouds, in the ghosts of stillborn
thoughts she incinerated in her lungs.
Sometimes I wish she would tell me what
they whispered to her, instead of engraving them
as unreadable creases on the corners of her eyes.
Sometimes, the smell would jostle me between
wakefulness and sleep, her stun-gun chuckle
rumbling in my head. My senses clung onto her
and I heard scrawls of chalk against wall planks
for her abakada graffiti branded in my
five-year-old head (or were those forks on plates
when we only had shadows to eat?); I re-feel
the friction of linoleum on my skin as I grunted, crawling
out of a forced afternoon siesta (or were those creeping
days of numbness that I mistook for catnaps?); I relive teary
tug-of-wars at school gates, where I refused to let go
of your long, leathery fingers. All that and a handful more —
my adult mind a child again, roiling in Past Tense
until, after I burn, in her nicotine hold, I will be home.