Four Poems by Romalyn Ante

My father asks why I date a Japanese man

We are stuck in traffic under Selfridges Bridge.
Father grips the steering wheel. Don’t you know
what the Japanese did to our country? I know.
But memory is a swallow nest, fragile and shifting
and love is a salamander skiing down white clouds
of window glass.

Hindi mo ba alam? Father doesn’t move,
though the light’s green, the cars behind in chorus, blaring.
He stares beyond the windshield—at hectares
of rice fields he ploughed as a child. His steel
clanks against another steel—half-buried,
crusted mortar bomb dropped at a time
when every window was blown to embers
that children mistook for fireflies.

***

My grand aunt in Cuenca: the night before she wed,
found two bombshells in the courtyard.
Thinking they were rocks, she set them as a stove
onto which the cooks laid their cauldrons.

Minced goat meat, sautéed onions.
Hiss. An explosion
of limbs.

Father scaled a tree to fetch
an arm dangling from a bough;
a ladle still clutched in its hand.

***

The map unfolds in front of Father’s face—
a lieutenant asks him to translate
every cavern small enough to squeeze through.

The villagers say where darkness lies,
there are barrels brimming with Yamashita’s gold.
Father says where darkness lies,
people console themselves with an imagined trove.

The lieutenant beckons an army truck,
tarps the area for three days—
even the crickets can’t peek through.

Father tastes the bitter moss in his mouth,
grazes through tunnels small as rabbit holes,
emerges to the atomic flash of moonlight.

***

Father’s uncles were force-fed
water through a hose.
There’s a trellis in our old kitchen
chipped by the blades of Kempeitai
where they pinned Tio Nardo,
stabbed his stomach dry.

***

Bodies fill the Pamintahan well—
men, women, children.
A jeweller from Anilao excavates gold
teeth from the dead.

Some days I dream an omen:
a mountain ridge at bird’s eye view—
the keloid scar on my grandfather’s nape.
When he was young, a Kempetai kicked him

to his knees, thrust his head towards the well’s mouth.
It was almost full—his face half-a-foot away
from a stomach erupting with blood.
When the soldier swung, he threw himself into the well,

feigning death. Others say he was already dead,
but opened his eyes when a scarab crawled into his ear.
The gash in his nape, blocked with pebbles and sand,
hardened into his body’s talisman.

***

My grandfather, baptised Tagaliwás:
a guerrilla whose expertise was hit-and-run.

Tagaliwás: protection from bullets,
but also Tagâ: hacked.

Grenades bloomed in his pomelo tree.
Shrapnel like a meteor shower swerved from him

but a bullet hit the heart
of the woman he loved. Her chest burst

into the scarlet feathers of a macaw.
When birds cried outside his hut

he’d jump from sleep, trip in the shadow
of his blanket.

An invaded heart will swell
and suffocate in the body that houses it

until it splits open,
a pomelo doomed to rot.

***

The man I date is a Buddhist, confesses
he too was a soldier in his past life.

He takes my hand, across the metropolis
of Peri-Peri sauce bottles on the table,

lets me feel the birthmark in the jungle
of his gelled hair: his gunshot wound.

In this life, it is his talisman. I finger
the raised skin, the ridges of enemy lines,

before my father yanks my hand away
as if I am about to unearth something

long-buried, or pull the safety pin of a grenade.

Haematology

Under the microscope,
my blood cells shift. These mauve,
biconcave discs are a battalion plodding
through a swamp. I adjust the knob and find,
in focus, my grandfather’s brown iris—in his rifle’s
scope. His inhalations synchronise with mine.
We breathe so slow, but unobscured. His eye
holds the shadow of a Kempeitai in loin-
high grass in which his ear is still intact,
his skull, not yet a gorge of brain
and gore; not yet a tor
of scorpions.

I zoom in—
the Kempeitai moves
through a seaside town,
into a room with translucent
sheets on lattice frames, where
he stoops, mouth pursed
to the globe of his wife’s
abdomen.

Grandfather blinks,
switches the slide—in which
his mother (and other mothers)
are still gorgeous, pounding clothes
by a brook, their groins not yet oozing
with knuckle-bruise, their newborns
not yet tossed skywards from
the mould of comfort
rooms

to be
almost-anointed
by a slash of light,
before being caught, impaled
on the Kempetai’s blade;
and now I cannot
look

Mebuyan and Me

there is a season that mimics sucklings
a gust of laughter through the grating pendulum
of park swings
there is a weight to longing

a melody

a woman hums
her torso a towering bole
bronzed and swollen with burls
of breasts

nipples stout as pimpled bark
call a soul to crawl and suck

Mebuyan

isn’t that her name
the goddess who rode in a giant rice mortar
spinning through the underworld

she lulls the children from womb to tomb
nightjars croon from the hollow
of her navel
as the moon lactates gloom-sweet sap

to salve every wound
cool the sting of snakebites
in the ankle or behind the knee

when the rowans combust in misery
we burst into a house on Guy’s Avenue
trace the sour grunt of a long-gone mum
curled on the penny-rust of a kitchen floor
in the crook of her elbow a needle glints

her toddler under the sink
we scooped him out
his stomach an unplugged drain churning
a torrent of tarnished nails

at home

where the soft-blue nightlight
paints birdhouses on the wall
I teach my nephew
to spell song and hope
while other children shatter
like meteorites learning a language
of anger and appetite

my nephew inks O
over and over
a hungry mouth
an echoing wound
the paper breaks

A Child Sent to Mebuyan’s Clinic

Miss, I want to walk with Cody Drake in the corridors;
butt in like the others when he speaks of Kane, Walker:
those unfamiliar names that sound like heroes in folklore.

A white-tailed eagle sweeps the woods; I want to score—
whoosh that ball into infinity, like the sickest striker.
I want to laugh with Cody Drake along the corridors.

At home, I practice scissor kicks, knee-slide the floor,
utter Wagwon? Bollocks in front of the mirror;
the unfamiliar words bubble like potions of yore.

In my wallet, I stash Season cards from Singhsbury’s store,
sub Jesus Christ with Kane surging for a header.
Our fist-bumps ripple red down the corridors.

But Cody calls me gay, flicks my ear till it’s sore
since I trade Kane for three freakin’ mingers;
their unfamiliar names, only sidekicks in this strange lore.

Yes, I nicked Nkosi’s cards, called that grass Beth a bore.
I get it, Miss. Some vultures rip the sky in eagles’ feathers.
But I want to laugh with Cody Drake in the corridors:
the lads to flock me—just once—to be the hero on this shore.

Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet and editor. Her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto, 2020), was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.