Louie used to swipe 
Star Brites Peppermints
from the candy dish 
at work
he’d squirrel them away 
in his deep pockets
and store them in my 
designated “mint drawer” 
when he got home; 
they were daddy down the side
aisle at the Naval base commissary, 
they were a rare treat, 
a somewhat bumbled 
love language.
On disability now
Lou prowls the local
Asian grocery
before closing, mining for
the occasional blue or white 
baggies of Jack ‘n Jill 
menthol candies. I think
that’s his more overt sort of 
love language, too.
I stopped smoking for 
long spell. I started up
full force again. Chewing 
on mints alleviates my anxiety 
and listlessness. Puffing cigarettes
keeps me from prediabetic possibility. 
Having a mint sit like a cool stone between
my hard palate and tongue save me from 
chain smoking myself into insanity.
Rote on. Rote off. 
He, Louie, would buy packets 
in pairs, hoping they would last 
me a bit longer. Our crazy love affair
is a flirtatious one, the bracing, cooling
lozenges & me. We both play it smooth
when I snip of a corner of the pouch, and
slip a single demure candy from its pinky-
sized puncture. By Day Six, the whole tawdry
liason has gotten hot and heavy, and one whole
package has already gone missing.
Still, the tokens of affection 
are replenished.
I guess I should 
probably keep mum
about the fling I fell into
with Altoids Peppermints.
I’m a sucker for 
the curiously strong & 
silent types.

I
admit there’s
a chip on 
my figurative shoulder for
all the chili oil dumplings
that will have to go unsavoured
while I willow-wallow here in bum-knee jail,
Impasse, awaiting the arrival of night and moon’s
insomniac presence, the sweet, sharp bark of the bat.

I long to become
swallowed up by the green 
of everything, whilst traveling 
to no particular endpoint. Can we
be people again, just persons
living our lives, arms flung wide
to receive its unabashed fullness, 
sip in deeply of the chaos darting
beneath its clear, uncomplicated 
waters? What of this perpetual 
rushing to and fro, too busy to
question the why, too anxious 
to go back to the root of what 
seemed to be so important,
so alluring to chase after
to begin with? Have we evolved
into a connected, intricate network
of sophisticated mechanisms, self-
sustaining, self-imposed isolation
toggled on, alone in the middle 
of a bustling, stifling, elbowing crowd?
It seems, my friend, that
this is the last great joke. 
We are the unwitting punchline.
In seeking this elusive, deeper
connection, the one tribe to which
we come home, we have alienated our
kin, severed from our flailing, hungry 
roots. We can no longer call 
this place native land.  
Our feet point in all wrong directions
following maps that have skewered 
their intent. Compass lost and found,
needle spinning and pausing, once
knowing fragments of true north, now
turned to myth, we pound pavements 
that will always feel alien and sloping 
to our bare, aching soles.

Nature
appears in 
the headlights
out the window
on a swift, 
winding 
car ride
at dusk,
wheels turning
along long-ago
pathways
when we 
thought 
we had 
forgotten
the way back.

We are shocked
alive, vibrant 
and green
in remembering.

I have become swallowed up by the green
of everything. 

Breathe in. Breathe out. 
Come, be devoured, too,
or please leave me hidden in leaf cover
as you drive away and do not 
glance back once.

hollow concrete walls 
painted in lemon yellow
a preteen girls bane
i wanted hot pink striping
but big sister got first dibs

i fancy spider 
silk draping the doorway to
my childhood bedroom
—the barbies sunbathing with
butiki who have moved in

multicolored cats 
waver on the cream curtain
flutter hello to
the tadpole pond beyond it
dad on the lawn sets up grill

light draws images
diagonally on wall 
of my tiny room
girlhood dreams dragonflies
racing in their dust mote planes  

Blue moon

Mama sang along to the old Marcels standard

You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

Its notes hung in the air, easy, melodious invitation
I would join in, five year old pipes crooning all the words 
This became our unspoken ritual
This became a secret she would share with only me

While Daddy worked, kept things orderly at the BEQ
While Jay-Jay was still at school or heading 
on her way to a Girl Scouts troop meeting
While our orange tabby Frisky was a rosy cinnamon
bun circle, curled up atop the rice dispenser
dreaming of Mama chopping up chicken skins

While Rolan was not yet the wink at the tip of a teardrop
While he was still a softer dream and not a fervently wished-for boy

While I was still the baby of the family
While I still had my mama’s company, 
attention, and time

We would sing of a missing love
And a heart with a desperate invocation to distant Blue Moon
We would laugh and hug and repeat the chorus
and for a moment have our own companion Blue Planet
all to ourselves, planetary population: 2
This was my silent, thrumming entreaty 
to an indifferent Blue Moon

Now in my middle adult years
the words burble up my throat half-sung
half-hummed, half-remembered
A Blue Moon visits the sky 
of my lonesome planet 
unannounced 
and I miss her return
I gather up my scribbled 
supplications
for loves now long gone
and those still hanging 
in the firmament
I gather up these well-worn
pages, and with my trowel 
in hand, I bury them carefully 
in the garden

Creep in
through the side
door, the hole, the pin
prick, my dream opened
up as it is leaving, leaving
room for my subconscious
to get a whiff of fresh air and
my semi-conscious to text
my conscious, wake up, 
foolish romantic, you gullible
half-wit, no one rolls up into
your fluffed-up, tricked-out
dreamscape anymore, pulling
you into their dizzying scent, 
their melty-sear hand singeing
close the small of your back.
It is in the moment,
the moment
—that moment—
when I burrow my 
lust-flushed face beneath
the slicing curve of your 
jaw, the curve made just 
for this particular concoction
of my own madness, that I
commit the precise
(oh so marvelous)
wonder, an act where I
tip my chin up to gaze this
adoration into your wanderlust
eyes to find you left 
the blooded pin prick, 
the gawping-mouth hole, 
the swinging side door, 
unlocked
and ajar.

Mama and Daddy have been buzzing 
about the party they will hold this week

Connecting with friends they gathered during 
the now longer time they’ve been here in the States

Aunties and Uncles who were never related to us to begin
with, mga Tita at Tiyo who share my parents’ experience

All immigrants, from far-flung regions in their native Philippines
I wonder sometimes if they mused about meeting by chance

Speaking different local languages and carrying their home customs
they transmuted these into dishes and peppered blended wording

This morning I awoke to the steady sound of my Daddy moving ‘round in the kitchen—kumakayod siya ng niyog

Its rhythmic motion is a reassuring start to my day, a familiar sound:
Tsuppt! Tsuppt! Tsuppt! The coconut shredder sings its work song

My Mama’s slight, graceful body is a lesson in constant industry;
pots already bubbling and spitting steam upon the stove

Fixings for the beginnings of kutsinta adorn the kitchen table
bowls of dark brown sugar and tapioca flour

A large cutting board bearing finely chopped vegetables and dry
lumpia wrappers neatly line the kitchen counter, ready to go

I pause to hear the comfort nestled in my parents’ playful home-tongue banter. This young, I’ve yet to understand all they say

My older sister pops her head in the kitchen door, can she make some party decorations out of construction paper? 

Only if you include your sister in this project, my mom calls out, and only if you promise to get along and don’t make a mess