TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION // Poem by Mae Espada
Yes. I have always been
this way. A period down
is another end
to a new beginning.
Because how does god appear
to those who knew solitude
not as fear
but a natural revulsion
to vulnerability. Because what else
is a natural response
to ambivalence and terror
and grace. This is what I know.
It is acquired taste:
A decadent, reliable constant.
Because there are things I refuse
to accept
and things I refuse
to forget. Because it is me.
Subconscious made manifest.
Because it never died. It never truly left.
Because it never stopped being
my responsibility. To claim otherwise
is naive and criminal.
Because joy is an equation
I never bothered to learn
but I nevertheless earned.
Because at times
it was handed to me.
By calloused, working hands.
Even when I did not ask.
By kneading hands. Without needing
anything back. Because at times
I needed to yank it away
from another. Because I needed
a way to remember. Because when I look
at its rotten core. I can only see my reflection.
Because it gets too much. All of this
intimate, fragile, desperate humanness.
Because I was made mess of another.
Because I made mess of another. And I wanted
a way to remember. These thorough lines of lives
bleeding into each other. Because these amorphous yearnings
have to be tangible and real and beautiful.
And I want to remember.
Because there are more phantoms than people.
Because what else will I do
with all of this. Because I know I should.
I know I can.
It is all I have ever known.
Because I see my hands,
curling and attentive, forlorn
against its own.
Ma. Crisley Mae T. Espada is a working law student, reader, writer, and former instructor based in the Philippines. Mae uses she/her/hers pronouns. Her interests include Marxism, ecocriticism, as well as queer and postcolonial studies. She believes the place we deem as "home" plays an essential part in our own making and unmaking as an individual and as a collective. Mae believes that writing, apart from being a form of creative expression, is also a civic engagement, and a call to action. When she grows up she aspires to become a rainforest or a long river running.