For Jaine Macalaguing Madrid, maternal grandmother
Di ni basta-basta, says Jaine, preaching what might be a venerable art form, wrapped in malong from waist to sole, as she sat on used sacks of corn and a pile of palm tree leaves weaved as roof for a makeshift piggery of sucklings. Hold the leaf, let the púrok blade trace the outline of the midrib from sheath to edge, like deboning fish. Left and then, right, or right to left. Repeat.
Use the thumb to push the side opposite the blade, the pointing finger to guide the lead. Those who’ve been doing this long enough now push the blades in their direction. But presence of mind is the key, or suffer from a sting of a cut. Maputol gyod na imong tudlo, warns Jaine, now munching boiled cassava dipped in coconut sugar, her dentures inside a rusty cup, as she tells you tales of careless kids, their fingers cut, from Lumbo where she grew up and Hablanan where she met your grandfather Alvaro. You knew none of the names she mentioned, unsure if they even existed, yet you believed her. After all, she knows exactly how to comfort your fear of the sound of every chainsaw as it cuts through a neighbour’s tree trunk, cooks the best chicken adóbo, too.
No trace of the leaf shall be left, only the yellow-green midribs, shaved, smooth, smells like naked tree trunk or of crumpled green leaf of a house plant in a kitchen play set. A hundred more of this and you get one for the backyard, and another for the front lawn. Still a different one for the piggery and poultry. Still a different one for a neighbour or a relative who might need it, just in case. She knew this since sixth grade, her last year in school, she told you, as she had to look after the sickly Ingko Narô, her younger brother whom you might’ve met in a family occasion once. In this, there is no physics involved, only precision asked by countless mid-summers, long familiarised like muscle memory or a litany to some patron saint.
You see: The shade of the payag, hut surrounded by the cornfield and the prairie’s lone avocado tree in the round of Jaine’s eyes as she looks at you, a student of silence, an oversized straw hat on top of your head. The kind of heat of the rift of that part of the day where noon transitions to afternoon. This fond memory of her, in a cleaning implement. Your yearning for home.
__________
Silhig bíkog or silhig tíkog (n.) Cebuano Binisayâ for outdoor stick broom made from midribs of coconut leaf
Alton Melvar M Dapanas
(they/them), a native of southern Philippines, is the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at London-based Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and Iowa-based Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and editorial reader at Creative Nonfiction. Their nonfiction, book reviews, translation, author interviews, and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals, magazines, and anthologies in Sweden, Lebanon, Germany, Taiwan, the United States, Austria, Japan, and the Netherlands; the latest of which can be found in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Tolka (Ireland), New Contrast (South Africa), The Best Asian Poetry (Singapore), Mekong Review (Australia), Canthius (Canada), and Poetry Lab Shanghai (China) where they were translated into the Chinese. Find more here.
