piece suit nearest the air conditioner indifferent to statues and elusive beacons because this is the minor league and my own companion anticipates VISA to Italy and a salary remitted to parents raising grandson her continued tenure ligation makes possible - My mother is the youngest of eight in the archipelago there is not lack of barrenness in this business there are no babes - Gravidity is obsolescence - So we are watching the twin audition their legs like drumsticks I do not follow drumstick legs the disco ball mutes parody my rival smokes a thick cigar I can lose a bidding war of what is impregnable – and I look at the leg bones, defleshed. We tacitly agree to our uncanny pairing no economic forecast could predictonly in Olongapo where remanded to the system daughters not good for the soil or the laundry - I want the familiarity of her mouth again to expect her tongue I want to trace her legs as geometrically defined by nylon but when a guest relations officer is removed from the club she discards uniform and invisibly armored in designer blue jeans and simple blouse the transformer outside the hotel erupts in the storm in the blackout because no money exchanged we hold each other clothed instead I do not want to lose her again in the darkness I study her face her tattooed brow that draws me in to study her eyes the alluvial depositions of Zambal volcanic streams the cousin choosing to kneel beside me in the river? the American returned from several thousand miles to bury grandfather I was 10 years old meeting my supposed barkada in the shallows we received the cross on the forehead saliva of the dead.
Sean Labrador y Manzano lives on the island off the coast of Oakland. He edits the anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. His chapbook, The Gulag Arkipelago is published by Tinfish. Recent writing appears in Aufgabe, Eleven Eleven, Generations, Conversations at a Wartime Café (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Volt, The Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/seanlabrador-y-manzano.html) and else where.
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