for Mr. and Mrs. Kharchenko, driving past the port city of Odesa
At four a.m. vegetables are going
to be delivered but no market destination yet.
My stomach sags with old food in this long day
trip from yesterday’s nightmare to this recovery
your mother signs with anonymity.
These wrinkles on the face are nothing
but fattening asparagus wired to my brain’s
street map of indeterminacy. Visible horizon
glowing my hair, to be grey and still; I hope
I care for another season. This tunnel cares
so much about mobility and spicy crises.
It does. It’s the reason why we deliver
dried oreganos or life and death safely from
point to point, why in express we smell home.
I stay alive though, sensing velocity
as an ambulance would in a dream—
brisk, accidental. Remember the first time
your little bones cried for milk?
The turquoise lights I detest are satellites,
the remaining light so imperial to touch the end
the remaining skin of drones, my alabaster
bed, memories dissolving to onion molecules,
not dying as I am the same boy my mother
used to kiss. My body remembers,
the goods are safe and I feel a likeness veined
in marble upon marble of my hopes for you.
As long as you’re here entering tunnels
with me, stuck to our old Sinatra on the stereo,
I’ll have no problem closing my eyes
in this eternity of four a.m.
Lawdenmarc Decamora is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated Anglophone poet and academic writer based in the Philippines. He is the author of several poetry books and chapbooks, most recently “Lady Pat's Chapbook of Manicured Eyebrows for Post-Fordist Vending Machines” (UK: Newcomer Press, 2023). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, The Common, Griffith Review (AU), Berkeley Poetry Review, Peripheries, Mantis, The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22, Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology, among others. While contributing literary work to various international literary journals, Lawdenmarc also produces research work on SEA cultural studies for the University of Santo Tomas (UST), the oldest existing Catholic university in Asia.
Photo by Iryna Riabchykova