by Momo Manalang

—for my mother

She wore a tongue collapsing between
a native ring and a Westerner’s thunder,
traced her name from a typhoon’s mouth–
its petrichor bearing Haiyan’s accent.

She married the maid’s broom,
cleansing boats across the Pacific’s lips
of marine backwash, backwash, backwash;
oceans warbling in English and Pampango.

Somewhere in the belly of her province
nanay lit votives, holy in glass sheath.
She was brought to the Americas without
a language to mother, absent of its flame.

What remains prophetic of the Immigrant?
Bodies of neighborhoods reimagined,
bodies of borders exposed,
origin melting into colorless waters.

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Momo Manalang is a queer Filipino-American writer and community organizer. She is the Vice-Chair of GABRIELA New York, a militant women’s organization fighting for National Democracy in the Philippines with a socialist perspective. Her work entails waging local campaigns in defense of the Filipino people’s human rights and welfare. She currently resides in Little Manila Queens.

by Momo Manalang

Mother                                    you splice my mango mouth in June,

                    shed my ripe skin                    in pockets of dawn,

                                                                                  lather

this naked tongue                    til’ shrimp paste                                  permeates,

                   beckon summer           to sing us                     eighteen thousand miles,

         until Pampango harvests                     my name                     from the sampaguita;

you, an exhausted ocean         who enlivens such roots,

          I learn to arrive            home                                      a child of the sun

                                   who serenades             without dry lungs—

         Nanay                                      you unravel me like seeds unfurling

in diaspora’s garden.

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Momo Manalang is a Filipino-American writer from Miami, Florida. She is currently studying Human Rights at Columbia University in New York, and already has plans of returning to the Philippines to pursue various political endeavors. Between July to January, she will be embarking on a leave of absence to Luzon to participate in community integrations with Filipino activists, assist in an international convening of women leaders, and intern at a reputable research institution for human rights.