Imago

As soon as we became men
my brother and I wore skirts.
We pinched our skirt-fronts into tents
for our newly-circumcised penises, the incisions
prone to stick painfully to our clothing.

I was partial to my sister’s plaid skirt,
a school uniform she outgrew; my brother favored
one belonging to my grandmother, flowers
showering down his ankles. 
By this stage, the skin around the tips
of our penises was swollen the size
of dwarf tomatoes. 

As a cure, my mother boiled
young offshoots of guava leaves.
Behind the streamline of hung fabric,
I sat on a stool and spread
before a tin washbasin.  My mother bathed
my penis with the warm broth,
the water trickling into the basin like soft rain on our roof.
She cradled my organ, dried it with cotton,
wiping off the scabs melted by the warmth,
and she wrapped it in gauze, a cocoon
around my caterpillar sex.

I then thought of the others at the verge of their manhood:
my brother to replace me on this stool,
a neighborhood of eleven-, twelve-, and thirteen-year old
boys wearing the skirts of their sisters
and grandmothers, touched
by the hands of their mothers,
baptized by green waters,
and how by week’s end
we will shed our billowy skirts,
like monarchs, and enter
the gardens of our lives.

(Previously published in PinoyPoetics and Mudfish)

Poem for my Navel

First mouth,
where my mother
first kissed
me, I offer my finger
to figure the depth
of my separation,
Gulf Divide, terra
incognita, crater
in the Sea of Tranquillity,
a momentary attachment,
a detachment
for the rest of my life, Pangaea
before the continental drift,
an ocean subsided into white
desert, a whirlpool
quieted, my scooped-out
heart, depression,
epicenter of my first
quake, where I heard
my father’s baritone
rumbling a folk song: Mynah
Bird, in your dark light
and feathers carry
me off to a castle
made of bamboo.
  Navel: my hollowed
reminder, my dried
flower, bird’s
nest, peach pit, poached
egg cup, empty
shell, scallop, my oyster
pearl-purse,
you burn along
an equator, my homeland,
my Philippines I
never conceived
of leaving, mother, dear
sustenance, my senses
in the obsidian darkness,
cross-wires of my existence
and non-existence.

(Previously published in Puerto del Sol)

The Bringers of Bread

In the prenatal, rooster-summoned morning,
my brother and I awaken and slip
through our mosquito nets as darkness
fades slowly into blue-and-bluer.

We walk into the dreamy air
not before grabbing the few pesos and centavos
waiting for us on top of our mother’s bureau.

The gray road and the click-clack of our slippers:
we know at the end of both is the bakery.
Until then, we pounce on stray cats and birds.

We play leapfrog, leaping over each other’s
bent body: bodies that evolved from the same
womb churning into one rolling animal.

At the bakery, we bask in the clean scent
of newly-baked pan de sal, providers that we are.
We press the brown bags to our hunter’s
breasts and let the warmth seep beneath our ribs.

(Previously published in Chaminade Literary Review)

Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines, and was raised there and in Los Angeles, where he immigrated with his family when he was twelve. He holds degrees from Loyola Marymount University and the Creative Writing Program at New York University.  Currently, he lives in New York City and works at Columbia University. Imago, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming in fall 2007 from CavanKerry Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, recently in the North American Review, Bamboo Ridge, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto Del Sol, Seneca Review, The Literary Review, and the anthologies Contemporary Voices of the Eastern World and Titling the Continent.  A recipient of a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), he co-founded Kundiman (http://www.kundiman.org), a non-profit organization serving Asian American poets.