1.
I found a book published in 1925 on a city.

In 1994, I took a train to that city.

I took the book out when I got to the city.

I followed the map in the book’s inside flap to make my way

From the train station to a university where I found more books on the city.

I made copies.  

After four hours, I left the city.

Four years later, I returned in a moving truck.

I carried a 1998 map.

I put it on a kitchen wall and marked places that existed in 1925.

Dots ringed downtown.

Now the northwest corner of the United Center

Now a vacant lot

Now the Kennedy Expressway

Now the Kruger Gallery next to the Frontera Grill.

(In 1947: the Metallic Letter Company.)

Now a biomedical lab at Pritzker Medical School

Now a People’s Auto Parking garage

2.
I dotted the north-south city streets following the local train

To hotels, restaurants and private homes.

Seven days a week. Sometimes you take your book and try to read

On the elevated. You read or you fall down, sleepy.

In 1917, two pensionados lived here

Each going to a YMCA Christmas dinner.

One went to Hamilton College of Law

And the other to UIUC.

This address shows up in the Filipino Employment Agency Files from 1929 to 1932

The membership rolls of the Big Visayan club

The attendees of the Postal Club dance

And the Hines Circle Dance in 1931.

Someone who lived here answered a survey

By Mixon and Noss in 1932 or 1933.

In 1944, this address was shared by two couples.

Impossible to get evidence concerning nature

Of dancing as white person is conspicuous.

The anonymous person is essentially

A non-moral person.

3.
The city archivist said

You’ll find the Lithuanian social-realist artist Ben Shahn here but none of your kind.

I’m telling you twice.

100 Phillipinos at the New American #2 October 10

50 Phillipinos at the New American #2 October 11

3 Phillipinos at the Madison-Ashland October 11

10 Phillipinos at the New American #2 October 12

20 Phillipinos at the Empire October 12

5 Phillipinos at the Colonial October 12

150 Phillipinos at the New American #2 October 13

90 Phillipinos at the Plaza June 22

80 Phillipinos at the Mayfair June 16

100 Orientals and Phillipinos at the Mayfair June 25

65 Phillipinos and Japanese at the Mayfair July 14

85 Phillipinos at the Mayfair August 8

75 Phillipinos at the Mayfair October 13

75 Phillipinos at the Plaza August 4

67 Phillipinos at the Plaza August 18

85 Phillipinos at the Plaza October 13

85 Phillipinos at the Plaza January 5

95 Phillipinos at the Plaza January 24

70 Phillipinos at the Plaza February 16

50 Phillipinos and Japanese at the Mayfair February 17

4.
The owner of a poolroom and barbershop

Interrupted.

Let me ask you something

Before I tell you that.

Just what is it you are doing?

I want to know first:

Are you going to publish anything?

After the libraries closed, I went to new friends’ houses

To talk about what was going on in the city.

I looked at their maps of the elevated pinned to their

Kitchen walls and traced how I followed the 1925 local

To the same place.

If I am to really understand what they have to face

I must be able to see things through their eyes.

To do this I must know good and bad,

Ride the elevators where they work,

See how the bus boy is treated,

Go into the basement of the post office and live

That world for a time, visit their rooms, you see.

5.
I cross-referenced a city historical file with a box

On someone’s kitchen table.

Where a name and address appears is someone’s old attic.

One couple did domestic work together.

Their names are a number funneled into a larger statistic.

The scent of the elevated from attic to archive is too impatient.

28 organizations
28 intramarriages
500 intermarriages
2 dance halls
6 social clubs
3 tennis clubs
4 musical clubs
4 dry cleaners
2 restaurants
6 barbershops
2 pool halls
3 newspapers
2 apartment houses
1 grocery store
3 tailor shops
2 radio stores
1 photograph studio

I copied charters and constitutions for a floating micro-city

Of absentees.

6.
Above where Madigan’s used to be

Four couples and three children, 1934-6.

In 1935, one of the men and two children

Were requested to be repatriated

By the man’s father

Who was in the Philippines.

I tried to date the best friends of the women I dated.

I tried to date a best friend but she was too familiar.

I counted the bars I hung out in and memorized their

Names and addresses.

Very seldom is one of them asked to a good home.

The woman who kept the box on her kitchen table

Called my days full of leisure.

The landlord raised the rent.

I closed my boxes into a hatchback and left the city.



Author’s Note: “I Was a Twenty-Four-Year-Old Separatist” appeared in Horse Less Press Review. It refers to pre-World War II pensionados — Filipinos funded by the U.S. colonial government to attend American post-secondary educational institutions. It lists names of taxi-dance halls, and it quotes from the following: (1) Estrella Alamar’s interview with Mateo and Mary Vergara, August 31, 1979; Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago; (2) Paul G. Cressey, “A Comparison of the Roles of the ‘Sociological Stranger,’” Urban Life 12: no. 1 (1983, originally written 1932): 111; and (3) John L. Mixon, Interview with Bartolomé Nicolas, October 23, 1932 housed at University of Chicago Theological Seminary. This poem will be published as part of a manuscript, Solitude Being Alien, by Dancing Girl Press.

                                  first
be bright, white and clean
repeat for the echo
fan, flag, five, four

calm your horse
when on the mountain you meet
her naked

ice cream soda — without accent
since you asked
record this fairy tale

slip it between statistics  
go native just enough
your job is done

                                    then
go to the nearest Y, foreign club, church of world citizenship
nod at lectured good intention
swallow consonants, mumble fervor

arise an oracle
a dream of
dust-moted heat swirling

how you learned all the presidents
mildewing festooned on the wall
here he looks right at home

Washington-blink-Rizal
Rizal-blink-Washington
oriental indirectness comes in handy

in the middle of nowhere
nothing’s too far away
church circle, farmstead, town hall

soda jerk, factory, the other side of the tracks
enter their homes, eat at their tables
keep a distance from the daughters

pick out the best in them
you can’t slide by on innocent looks
the price of hemp is below normal

copra pays nothing
sugar, cigars, and rice are worth dirt
you are rotting on the shelf or ripening

Author's Note: A version of “Instructions on Travel in the New Empire” appeared in MIPOESIAS.

“They swell up like toads.” —A. F. Miller, 32^nd Voluntary Infantry Regiment, Philippines, 1900

the way is approximate, forced connections of copper ears and cannon eye

gold panning left hand was left and leapt, left on the ground, a severed ex-friend     

the ugly untended plows neat rows, soft-elbows a hunt, maker my making

a pickle touch darkening continents, blackened damp, wisdoms a fortune

an avenue for kings forsaking pilgrims, a chance trip forking blanketed snow

torture a tender missive, rebranding better life-chances into aspiration

at the end of history, this water down the throat a breathing fact

be with girls now, pick a lady, subject only mango and jungle

tremble the untouchable accursed music betwixt Red Bull and Metamucil

minded baby, eastern pink, fat bridge, westerly rage

a rough cup, sno-cone, mortal grain, a short cut

nor’easter squall, shade ladies, forgot to pink, a baby

earthen polenta, projectile tattoo, fabric eye, thermal map

skin mag, tunnels to caves, remote drones, shark and silk

crispy parts, eye on the north, buckled knees, book exchange

binational burrito, red nanny state, southern fat sun, power point

stilled root, buried war, veined maps, guerrilla skin

your descendants live among us, breathing in aspiration

to be like-us but not-like-us, but at least to eat bacon

this water down the throat under a safe skin, so much the better

If I speak for Melissa, I must speak

from America as an American

to Americans and from the Philippines

as a Filipina to Filipinos

and to those with masks on

with my hood on and tape

across my mouth. I must speak

for the right to return to the place

of my birth on programs of exposure

and immersion, upon being endorsed

from the USA to the National to Central Luzon

to Tarlac, with a camera, external hard disk, a laptop,

an ipod, a journal, a sphygmomanometer,

a stethoscope, thermometers, medicines, my watch,

and a wallet. I must speak

of the right to witness without violation,

whether or not I am mistaken for another

North American Filipina activist,

by torturers and senators of the home country

of my parents. Let me be unhooded, uncuffed,

unsuffocated, undoubled over, unshot, unraped,

unsaved, and undisappeared. I must speak

upon resurfacing and speak for those unsurfaced

sitting at the other end of the earth.

When asked: “Handa ka na bang mamatay?,”

I give my name: Melissa. 

When asked whether I would return

to the fold, I repeat my name, Melissa. 

Melissa, not Maita. Melissa, not NPA. 

Melissa, not CP. Melissa, not America. 

Melissa, not (even) the Philippines. 

Our country is wider than fear.

Yes, I live. We live among the relics:

a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera,

a Bible, a pair of slippers, a t-shirt, biscuits,

handcuffs, and a password. Yes, you live.

“Kundiman for Melissa” is written in collaboration with Yael Villafranca and Niki Escobar in response to a prompt from the organization “Justice for Melissa.” The prompt asked for a poem modeled after Illya Kaminsky’s “Author’s Prayer.” It appeared on the website “Justice for Melissa” and in Maganda Magazine.

a memory: flat-out reading the inside dust jacket

text copied through the loud plastic

stumbling over the word TSAR

still you should put your money in my purse

all my eggs are in this basket, no need to read on

careful, the plate is hot; method, theories, how I roll

a list of everyone I’ve ever heard of but never really read

prove capable of wifery

compare on company letterhead your collegiality and a head of lettuce

for every syllabus copy the plagiarism policy

audiotape the role-play, you’ll never get to Italy or Flanders

yes-or-no answers build opinion only when she talks for more than three minutes

if her opinion is ungrounded, she must not lapse into silence

as Francis I, write a letter to Leonardo da Vinci asking him to retire in France

discuss your bikini tan at tenure-and-promotion meetings

a list of all the inferiors in love with you, reenacting courtly gestures

she can forge an archival source because she has no currency

do stay in the probationary vestibule until your DNA maps the discipline

hi Ms this is with A T I a crass your retirement company to roll over

an old account into the irate as a enrollment rollover specialist

on the fine again that’s morsey poor not with T I A Crap thanks

so much I look forward to speaking with you

the student needs to read without moving her lips

letters by people rich enough to write

role-play the reunion of art students in 1500

one returned from Italy and the other from Flanders

early twenty-first century idiom expected

so messed up I want you here in my room I want you here

now we're gonna be face-to-face and I'll lay right down in my favorite place

and now I wanna be eaten by the Igorots at St. Louis now I wanna be

eaten by the Igorots at St. Louis now I wanna be

well c’mon

“Poem for A: a memory: flat-out reading the inside dust jacket” includes a computerized transcription of a message left on Google Voice. It re-translates lyrics from The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and refers to an American urban legend that the hot dog was named as such at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair during the immensely popular exhibition of Filipino Cordillerans performing dog-eating rituals. A version of this poem was published in Everyday Genius.