When a Person Goes Missing (Excerpt)

When my brother was a teenager and I was in grade school, he let some bullying kids from his high school convince him to skip the day and invited them over to our house. The boys refused to leave after being asked, so my brother grabbed our father’s shotgun and corralled them into the bathroom, the barrel pointed in the boys’ direction. The bathroom door now locked, my brother held the rifle, luckily, up toward the ceiling so that when his finger slipped and the mechanism went off, the bullet, with its massive force, went through the second-floor ceiling, the attic, and then out the roof of the house into the sky. How the rest of the family received the details of the incident, I can’t recall. But to travel home now is to walk beneath the hole in the ceiling stuffed with newspaper from 1978. To return is also to encounter the past lurking behind me, contorting its face so I can really feel it—its truncated force, whispering a ghost voice into my ear.

If I believed in omens, I’d say the shotgun incident was the worst of omens, literary in its foreshadowing. We can smell a hint of devastation, can’t we, a scent you can’t quite recognize upon first whiff, but you turn your nose away knowingly. Where will our characters end up? Our armed protagonist? The girl who tells the story? When I began working on this essay I wanted it to be about fate—how two black kids raised by the same working class parents could have radically different life outcomes because, as fate would have it, divergent occurrences compelled divergent paths. Bruce never went back to the high school with the bullying boys. He dropped out. It’s around this time when my parents get a call in the middle of the night that Bruce is in custody at the local precinct for being caught in a stolen car. It’s the 1970s and no charges are pressed. Boys being boys. That night, my father beats my brother mercilessly with a washing machine hose in the dank basement of our house. The chaos of a violence like that is astonishing. The cacophonous screaming. The inability for anyone to stop it. The cold pallor that hangs in the air afterward. A chasm emerged between us—me, floating off like some wandering balloon; my brother tethered tightly to a familiar story of trouble and poverty, like most of the kids in our neighborhood.

The question of fate was a fake question. It was a refusal to see how the good daughter is a part of the problem. As a kid, I was the exception, the one who would make it out of the ghetto, the one bussed out of town for school. I liked being the exception. I loved the ways people’s eyes would glimmer when I told them any little thing about my life, or when I, simply said anything aloud. “So well-spoken,” the middle class blacks would say. I basked, annoyingly, in their glow. I didn’t mind either when my brother failed because his failure meant my light shone even brighter. When Bruce is 17, already dropped out of high school, and I am 11, I’m allowed to go on ski vacations with the white families whose children I go to school with. I cannot ski, but they are patient. I don’t notice that I’m the only black face on the Vermont slopes. On the first trip, I’ve brought with me my beloved copy of Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, not that I could understand much of it. I loved it anyway, however, for its mysteriousness, and for how its “I” stands so solidly in the wilderness.

[No strawberry moon]

No strawberry moon for me, tonight. No strawberry moon. This small house creaks when I walk and open it. I have to weigh it, to goddess or not tonight. Goddess or godless. God is in my sleeping children’s presence tonight. I use words like god when I haven’t seen the strawberry moon, less when I haven’t been so generous. It’s not about gender—ess or less—but heft of the weight. Inside me like a baby. When people procreate. Romance a dashing thing. The harvest upon us. Will we feast or collapse in exhaustion tonight which is every?

Spring Summer Autumn Winter

I pushed my face toward
the sleeping radiator. I smelled a form
of justice. I wanted to be a poet. I waved
my living hands, dead
coupons. I watched him brush
his teeth. His teeth glinted
gorgeous. I stumbled.
Cartwheeled. I said, I will always fight
alongside you in the fight
against tartar buildup. I said, I will.
I said, Thank God without believing
in thanks. I thought what my parents did,
that wasn’t poetry. I believed
what white people said about my parents.
I had to say, Stop.
Stop believing them.
I suckled. Pickled. Made mistakes
about octopi. Wore a blue jockstrap
& took pictures. Accepted stickers of astounded
apples from friends. I was a wind
smooching another wind, who had
very good teeth. I was a name
everyone in America thought they were saying
right. Even he thought so.
Then asked, Is that right?
I pushed my face toward the noisy radiator.
Its clang & labor & here.
In bed I touched his voice
in his belly. I touched his Goodnight. He said it always
like it was important.
It was important. I believed in
the Silver Millennium. I said, Sailor Neptune,
one day, a poem for you.
I said, Sailor Neptune, teach me the Deep
Submerge, the Submarine Reflection, the thunderously
turquoise hair. I was a name
in America & would forget I belonged
to my teeth.
I dropped a single wish down the cavernous
mailbox. He would ask,
Is that right? He would bring
a single microwaved donut on a blue napkin at dusk.
He would leave me alone
with my poems. O
if I could lick all your toes at once. I would
write that poem. I loved him,
I told him. I loved him,
so told him about the dream.
The dream starred my parents, stars
of a death metal band’s
debut music video. They danced
like everyone was watching. It was important. Their arms
were poems. They said, So what
if we misspell “auditorium,” so fucking what—
we’ll always say
your name right.
They pushed their faces toward me.
Their poems toward me.
They leapt & thrashed, they were stars,
stars, stars.
I woke up weeping. Do you understand?
I thought I could only fall asleep
doing that.

The Book of Life And Death (Excerpt)

Ever since I left the Philippines to try my luck overseas, I’ve been lugging around a series of mismatched, plastic-covered photo albums and scrapbooks I call Marybelle’s Book of Life and Death. It’s a series. When I start a new album, I tape a ribbon to the center page, splitting the photo book into two chapters: Life and Death. I fill the pages of each album with snapshots of those who have just taken their first breath and those who have taken their last.

Without my mother’s help back home in Manila, my collection would be incomplete. For years, when someone in my family was born or died, my mother would grab the elbow of the photographer and say, “Remember copies for Marybelle.” Then she’d wrap the photos in plastic and mail them to wherever I was working—Lebanon or Saudi or Hong Kong.

Last year, my fellow Overseas Filipino Workers, the government called us new heroes, bagong bayani, poured the equivalent of over $33 billion, up 4 percent from the previous year, into our home country from all over Asia, Africa, and the Americas. We work on water—cruise and cargo ships; on land—nurses and nannies; underground—oil and mining; and in the air—constructing buildings and highway flyovers.

We are described as human capital stock, but I am very much human.

International mail takes forever, and I move around so much that sometimes the newborn is celebrating their one-year birthday or the newly dead is marking their first anniversary by the time the photos find me. But that was before smartphones and unlimited data. These days, my mother shares the images herself, sometimes taking pictures of someone else’s pictures, transmitting them instantly so that I can be sharply aware in real time of what I’ve missed. I print the photos in the few remaining places one can do this, pharmacies and copy shops. It’s convenient, but I don’t have the same feeling as when I would receive a thick envelope from the Philippines, the coarse, mustard-yellow paper still infused with the very odor of home. I’d hold it to my cheek, remembering the warmth of my mother’s skin. I felt loved, and remembering this love is how I survive without the company of the most important people to me.