I am forgetting the Tagalog
for mother, which is how it
all begins, doesn’t it? First, the words,
then a deluge that wipes them of all their
faces. There are trellis vines to be
uprooted and I could never bear
the violence of their unraveling, their stems coiled into
fingers grasping the clear, empty sky. In school, I made
the mistake of pressing the lockers
with my fingers and a student froze
so suddenly, I withdrew, became phantom
of middle school, little brown thing just
haunting the hallways. There are some things they don’t teach
you about plants: how to shift the earth so they can breathe or
not, if that was your thing.
I remember my seatmate
leading the class into a chorus
of laughter when the Mexican
farmer in our history video pronounced die
a bit like Diós, though it’s possible we just
failed to hear him saying that once tossed
to the wind, the vines will turn into holy
offerings for the God waiting for His part
in this sorry harvest. My history teacher
was in fact an unused English major prone
to teaching us about the ancients of literature
that had been crowded out by the more
vogue writers of the day, like Chaucer
yielding to Shakespeare. I don’t know
why I feel guilty when I can’t muster
the image of my history teacher’s tired
sunburnt face reciting Shakespeare as if
the poet’s sonnets never tasted the bittersweet
winds of a garden liberated to the wilds long
after he died. In school,
I made the mistake of calling
my mother and answering her
in Tagalog only to be suddenly cut
off by a supervisor asking me to speak
in English. When forced to say
I love you in a different language,
it sounds like a goodbye, or maybe
it was just my hyperventilating middle school
self speaking through the wild beasts of her
heart. If our conversation was let to
run its course, would I have known
this other shadow of life? Yesterday, my neighbor looked
at me oddly when I lined up all the things capable of death
in my house outside the curb near the grass:
knives, scissors, history books. So far, no one
has taken them, and they still sit
there, rusting in the open breeze. I admit I like
the shape of the horizon when cluttered
with fauna marrying the closest spaces
like the mountains I woke to
as a child—those ancient, dancing,
untamed gods. Where else would you find
such audacity? When the vines die, I sing to them
lullabies in Tagalog
I only understand
viscerally, like the need to remember
the origin of your lonely brown self.
Some days I ask myself if I’m better
than that seatmate who tugged first
at the laughter when here I am, offering my garden
in worship quietly as to survive. At night, the mountains
would grow into their ages,
bowed under the weight of the life
hidden softly in their shade: a mother
asking her stubborn daughter for a kiss,
the daughter’s young
tongue still as native
as a lifetime under the gentle
trees blocking the harsh Philippine
sun. Oh, all these words
Shakespeare never knew.

Yvanna Vien Tica is a Filipina writer with a hearing impairment who grew up in Manila and in a Chicagoland suburb. A high school senior, she is the 2021 Hippocrates Young Poet and the 2021 1455 Teen Poetry Contest Winner. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Salt Hill Journal, and Shenandoah, among others, and has been performed virtually in a 2021 UN Climate Change Conference event. She edits for Polyphony Lit, reads for Muzzle Magazine, and tweets @yvannavien. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day.