What Will Become of Me by Samantha Tetangco

Upon viewing Adrian Piper’s artwork by the same name

I. I could fill a dozen jars with the callouses I trimfrom my feet. Thick like my father’s, I cut themwith scissors like he did. They pile on the bedlike orange peels dried and hard to the touch. Or insect husks. Those dead miller mothsfrom that ha…

III. And yes, we’d learnedthis lesson: in the earlydays, nights in your bed,ears to your back. Dustso thick our lungs grewheavy with filtered sand.Scientists say cells areBorn in our deepest layers;we take six weeks to rise thenshed. How had we not…

A Filipino-American writer and teacher, Samantha Tetangco’s short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared and are forthcoming in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies, most notably The Sun, Zone 3, Arc Poetry, Puerto del Sol, Phoebe, Foglifter, deComp, and others. She received her MFA from the University of New Mexico and is currently Associate Director of the Writing Program at the University of California Merced.

Photo by Aime Cichero on Trends Hype / CC BY-NC