Meritage Press is delighted to congratulate the following winners for the 2005 “Babaylan Speaks” Poetry Contest, judged by Jean Vengua:

FIRST PLACE:
“Spaces” by Arkaye Velasquez Kierulf

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
“A House” by Mikael de Lara Co
“Save as Draft” by Joel M. Toledo
“APO BAKIT” by Amalia B. Bueno

SPECIAL MENTIONS:
“way /way/” by Marlon Unas Esguerra
“charmed” by Yvonne Hortillo

Below are the Winning Entries, Jean Vengua’s Judge’s Commentary, and the Poets’ Bios:

THE WINNING POEMS:

First Place:

“Spaces”
by Arkaye Velasquez Kierulf

1.

In this room I was born. And I knew I was in the wrong place: the world. I knew pain was to come. I knew it by the persistence of the blade that cut me out. I knew it as every baby born to the world knows it: I came here to die.

2.

Somewhere a beautiful woman in a story I do not understand is crying. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. She is holding a letter. She is in love with Peter. I am in love with her.

3.

Stand on the floor where it’s marked X. I am standing by your side where it’s marked Y. We are a shoulder’s length apart. I’m so close you can almost smell the perfume. If I step ten paces away from you, there could be a garden between us, or a table and some chairs. If I step another 20 paces there could be a house between us. If I continue to walk away from you in this way, tramping through walls and hovering above water, in 80,150,320 steps I will bump into you. I can never get away from you, and will you remember me? Distance brings us closer. There is no distance.

4.

In 1961 I was in Berlin. It was a dusty Sunday in August. In the radio news was out that Ulbricht had convinced Khrushchev to build a wall around West Berlin. I remember it precisely: By midnight East German troops had sealed off the zonal boundary with barbed wire. The streets along which the barrier ran had been torn up. I lived in that street. It was the day after my birthday. I remember the dust covering the sky. I remember being scared. Father had not returned from the other side. The Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse had orders to shoot anyone who would attempt to defect. Father had not returned.

5.

Happiness is simple.
Sadness forks into many roads.

6.

Before the time of Christ, Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the universe because he needed a stationary reference point against which to measure all other motions: a rock falling, a star reeling through the sky, his heart beating against his chest like a club. He needed to believe in certainty, in absolute space. Without it, the world would not be known absolutely. Without it, the world cannot be known.

Twenty centuries later Hendrik Lorentz needed to believe that every single molecule in the universe must move through a stationary material called the aether, as every human being in his various turnings must move through God. Scientists looked everywhere for proof of this aether. And everywhere they found nothing.

7.

I have sometimes been accused of being a bore. I beg to differ: people laugh at my jokes, and I’m handsome. I would like now to talk more about myself: I don’t like going to airports and hospitals. They make me uneasy. In both cases, somebody is always going to leave. I was born in 1983, and have never been to Berlin. But I have a memory of being in Berlin in 1961. I have a memory of something that never happened.

I would like to elaborate on myself, but you will understand if I talk instead about the sky in Berlin in 1961: it was covered with dust. There were no birds. There was no sky.

8.

Memory is brutal because precise.

9.

She said: give me more space. I said: don’t you love me anymore? She said: give me more space. I said: why? Did I do something wrong? Is there something wrong? Is there someone else? When did you stop loving me? In what precise moment? In what room? What city?

I held her tight as one who’s about to lose his own life holds on. Then she said: give me more space. I said: no.

10.

I have only one purpose: to live intensely.

11.

I wish I never met you
and I wish you never left.

You taste like a river in June.

12.

I’m going to say something important. Look at my face. Ignore my eyes. Just listen to me. But listen only to the timbre of my voice, not to what I am saying. They are different. They are two different rooms. The first is an exhibition of despair, the second only an explanation.

The first is all you have to listen to. So listen carefully because I cannot repeat myself:

“Everything/ one suspects to be true/ is true.”

13.

In 1879 a boy is born in Germany. At age five he’d throw a chair at his violin teacher and chase him out. In time he would develop the capacity to withdraw instantaneously from a crowd into loneliness. At twenty-six he would publish his theory of relativity in Annalen der Physik. He looks crazy, but he is certain: there is no aether, no absolute space.

14.

Sometimes they thought it was the words.
What they wanted to say could not be said.

They fixed the TV, vacuumed the rug,
dusted the furniture, looked out the window.

Sometimes she would purposefully lose hold of
a plate and it would smash to the floor.

Then they would have something to say,
only to begin to say it then stop.

15.

Look at this box. It is empty except for a diary, a book, and this picture in my hand. Now look at this picture. It weighs nothing and occupies almost zero space. I can slip it in anywhere and it will fit: inside the diary, under the box, through a crack on the wall. If I tear it several times, it will occupy a different volume, many and various. It mutates, you see. If I burn it, it will smoke into the air. It will take up a whole expanse.

16.

How many more times
are you going to let the world
hurt you?

17.

My father is an incorrigible storyteller. He would tell the same stories in different ways. I wouldn’t know which ones to believe. So I believed all of them. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu.

Father would point at the TV. He would repeat lines, rehearse the beginnings and ends, explicate with his hands the elaborate twists and turns of every road.

He said: “I am dying.”

I said: “But aren’t all of us dying.”

18.

And I thought the world
was about this leaving,
not about anybody’s leaving
but about this leaving.
The next day it was the same.

19.

A beautiful woman walks into a room. The room is dark. There are no windows. There is one light bulb but any time now it will go off. I pretend not to notice and look away, my heart beating against my chest like a club. If I strain hard enough I will hear a song in the background. What other forms of happiness are there than this?

20.

In 1989 the Berlin wall falls down.

21.

I believe in love only when it rains.

22.

To appreciate the value of land, one need only look into a painting: so much beauty. Buying land means buying the layers of beauty directly above it. It means buying the sky above it. And the birds above it, the clouds, the gods.

In truth you are buying a corner of the universe. You are saying: this is my room. You are saying: I live here. Here I exist.

23.

Your sadness is immaterial. You did
not come into the world to be happy.

~

You came to suffer/survive.

24.

How many words have you spoken in your life?
How many did you mean?
How many did you understand?

25.

Somebody picks up a phone. He dials a number. His voice travels a thousand miles into another country. On the other end somebody picks up and hears the voice. Who is this?– This is me. The phone is hung up. The voice travels back a thousand miles.

Elsewhere somebody picks up a phone and before he could dial forgets the number.

26.

Sometimes wars are waged because there are too many people in too few rooms.

27.

Memory is incomplete–lost.
The world is incomplete–vanishing.

Nothing more happens. You open your eyes and it’s over.

Memory is brutal.
Memory is precise.

28.

In the next room people I do not know are talking with hushed voices. Their secret slips out the window like a cat. It is raining, and I press my ear to the wall. I imagine that one of them is smoking a cigarette. I imagine that one of them is covering his mouth in surprise.

29.

When my aunt died the doctors said the fat clogged her arteries. Every week she visited the hospital, and every week the vein on her wrist had to be ripped out so a catheter could be stuck into her body to suck out her blood. You could see the plasma pass through a filter and then back to the body. If you put your ear to her wrist you would hear her heart.

Before my uncle died the heart attacks were so excruciating he said he’d prefer to just die. They transported him to the hospital, and on the way to the emergency room his heart gave. Mother said my uncle ate too much pork and drank too much beer. She wonders if he’s going to be happy in heaven.

30.

In some house in some province in some country in some novel there is a story of a man a father a child a lover who dies because of too much sadness.

31.

Nobody thought that what was wrong was the love.

32.

She said: give me more space.

*****************

Honorable Mentions:

A House
by Mikael de Lara Co

We begin with a house.
The spaces we inhabit
or used to inhabit. The silences.

The way we listen to something
that’s no longer there. Or the way we see:
at dusk: a lonesome shadow

dwindles into some other jaggedness.
Does it matter? Exactly a day later
it would dwindle back unto itself.

But this is not a poem about return,
the cycles the wind goes through,
or water, how it circles

the peripheries of each leavetaking,
how it’s the same everywhere.
How it’s always there. This is a poem

about a house: a fence, wood peeking
from underneath sallow paint; a chime
musicless in its rusty solitude.

This poem is about a house
and it is dark and it is raining
and no one is home.

Someone must have been here.
Someone’s always been somewhere. See:
the pith of an orange sits hardened,

orphaned on the kitchen counter. Imagine
the juice drying on a tongue.
Whose tongue? Maybe yours. Anyone’s.

Imagine the seeds, spit out, heavy
with the ghost of what’s not yet
anywhere. Imagine being there

when they become
something.

**********************

Save as Draft
by Joel M. Toledo

Or write as poem. The whole point is often
what we miss out on. To revise is to reconsider
the experience of, say, a leaf — never mind
that it is not green anymore. Or, pardon the sudden
evening. The transition was nice enough;
the explosive colors of dusk. And, didn’t you feel
so much sadness? I cannot explain it any better
than how I could when the outlines were still there:
trees and some wonderful new shapes.
Since then, things have changed. A pale hand
moves in the darkness. And someone is calling out,
come to bed, come to bed. And it is just you.
The evening insists on evening. It is that simple.
It is late enough as it is.

********************

APO BAKIT
by Amalia B. Bueno

She makes her own cigars, smoothing out
the dry leaves like leather, rolling the sweet,
pungent smell into a not-too-tight spiral
and knotting its thickness with black thread.

I watch her tie and snip the ends clean
then tuck the stash into the wooden drawer
of the ancient Singer sewing machine,
hiding treasures to share with visitors.

Apo Bakit smells like the homemade coconut oil
she awakens from its white solid sleep, melting
into clear liquid slathered on her palms, massaged
into her hair falling on shoulders down to hips.

Oiled and coiled round and round in a gray bun,
her hair obeys the tortoise shell comb’s flat teeth,
its arch, made elaborate with small gold flowers,
reigns in the trademark Filipino grandma hairdo.

Her white camisole, laced eyelet at the straps,
shows off sleek, brown shoulders. The straight skirt
of hand-woven linen, traditional thin stripes
and even thinner green-yellow-black lines,

a methodical pattern running the length
of the multi-purpose sarong wrapped twice
around her hips just so, edges folded inside
along the waist sealing in a compact bundle.

In the narrow halls of Apo Bakit’s home
she walks, hunched over and soundless,
her black velvet house slippers,
gem-splashed embroidery shiny with beads

slinking up on us with mean, squinting eyes
like a snake ready to pounce, turning her head
from side to side, never missing a single detail
of proof that we were up to no good.

She takes her whiskey straight, swigging Seagrams
from a small bottle kept handy, tucked in the top
drawer of a metal bureau dresser, along with
Tiger Balm and White Flower ointment.

Dr. Ramos asks if she’s been taking the pills
he prescribes for gout. He also tells her she smokes
too much, drinks too much, and to please stop
eating tomatoes, patani, dinuguan and shellfish.

She hisses at the doctor, asking what kind of Filipina
can live without tomatoes, beans and blood, then spits
out a stream of phrases about being too old to change
her habits now, her cussing worse than a stevedore.

It was at my house when I first saw her pluck
out a good-sized bisukul, a freshwater black snail
floating in a soup of tomatoes and onions.
She held the snail between thumb and pointer,

tapped its back end with a spoon quickly, just once,
crushing the shell at its most fragile point
then sucked out the meat from the front with such gusto
I felt sorry for the snail, all of its body gone so suddenly.

Apo Bakit outlives her only son, my father,
resentful that he left without a final word,
not another glance, no last chance to say anything
that would change her miserable life without him.

She wears black for 365 days, becoming harder
and more bitter, striking out and recoiling
at loved ones. She outlives her husband
and decides not to leave her house for one year.

She outlives her friends, then her neighbors
and relatives one by one. I remember her sadness,
her open palm, with skinny fingers pressed against her forehead.
No more visitors to smoke her hand-rolled cigars with.

I watch from inside the screen door,
her profile puffing the familiar cigars,
cheeks sucking in air, the fiery end
of the tabako pointing toward the street,

her quiet exhale at the folks passing by,
nodding to them in solemn recognition at dusk.
She spits now and then into the metal wastebasket
lined with shredded newspaper by her feet.

Her slow breathing, her face shadowed
in the twilight beneath the bittersweet
cigar smoke curling and twisting above,
disappearing with the memories of loved ones

bending and sliding like the wisps
of her long past, unwinding away from her,
the white smoke trailing slow, up
to the rafters of the darkened porch.

**********************

Special Mentions:

way /way/
by Marlon Unas Esguerra

●
1.
Pertaining
to
the
way
Digna
died,
how
she
at
twenty
-
three
months
in
every
way
resembles
me
at
32.
How
papa
had
come
such
a
long
way
from
the
mosque
-
in
-
the
-
Agusan
-
patty
to
the
International
Brotherhood
of
Teamsters.
How
mama,
in
a
much
smaller
way,
had
resigned
every
last
bit
of
herself
to
stay
with
him.
We,
as
the
remaining
siblings,
will
always
read
way
too
much
into
those
roach
-
infested
fist
fights
on
Hoyne
Street.
Such
was
the
way
of
the
year
of
the
rat,
the
year
Digna
was
born
to,
always
teetering
on
the
back
porch
railing.
When
it
finally
gave
way,
how
the
thud
through
the
kitchen
and
bedrooms
made
its
way,
drumming
all
the
drywall.
How
they
both
had
such
a
way
with
words
until
they
found
her
on
the
first
landing.
When
the
ambulance
arrived,
how
they
couldn’t
get
in
through
the
gangway
to
our
rear
apartment
with
a
stretcher.
How
papa
couldn’t
find
any
way
to
tell
them
they
wouldn’t
need
the
stretcher
as
he
led
the
way
up
the
stairs.
The
Four
-
way
discussion
with
the
EMT’s,
all
tears
and
black
zipper.

******************

charmed
by Yvonne Hortillo

there is this
like falling snow
de-scen-ding

and then, next
moment gives way,
for-ever away,

impossible to retrieve
e-ven if
turned over, again.

like a persistency,
a chafing, soft
impossi-bi-li-ty,

how can it
i-rri-tate
from you so?

like descending powder
covering all whi-te,
it melts quickly,

palm, open,
heart-beat,
the air, warm.

************************

JEAN VENGUA’S JUDGE’S COMMENTARY:
The winning poem is “Spaces.” Although the winning poem was clear, it seemed nearly impossible to choose the three honorable mentions, because every poem I read seemed worth reading and mentioning.

“Spaces” was quite lengthy, but it maintained a deft balance between seemingly disparate elements (stanzas varying from “historical” narrative, to the epigraphic: “Happiness is simple. / Sadness forks into many roads.”). I chose this poem for its almost cinematic shifting between multiple scenes and eras; its evocation of distance and separation; its play upon the spaces we inhabit and claim.

The three honorable mentions are:

“Save as Draft”
“A House”
“Apo Bakit”

“Save as Draft” unfolded wonderfully from consideration of “draft” or “poem” to the shape of change itself. “A House” pulled me into a magical realist interior that tasted of bitter orange seeds. I loved the title of “Apo Bakit” [Grandmother Why], and the way the narrative coils darkly and lovingly around its subject.

Special mention for the extended descent of “way/ way” and the meltingly ambiguous “charmed.”

*****************

POETS’ BIOS:
Amalia B. Bueno is a researcher and publicist living in Honolulu. Born in Quezon City, PI she emigrated to Hawaii at the age of seven. She has a BA in English Literature from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and entertains herself with writing poems and short stories. She was published for the first time last year, when three of her poems, “Filipina,” “Shame,” and “On Hearing My Mother Call Out To Our Neighbor Over the Courtyard Fence” were included in Bamboo Ridge Press, Spring 2005 Issue #87. “Apo Bakit” is a tribute to her grandmother.

Poet, Writer, Teacher, and DJ, Marlon Unas Esguerra is second generation Filipino American Muslim, born and raised in Chicago. He is a first year M.F.A. candidate in Poetry at the University of Miami. In 1998, he co-founded the panAsian spoken word ensemble, I Was Born with Two Tongues, which has since performed in over 300 colleges and venues across the country. Marlon is a three-time Chicago poetry slam champion and recently performed on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry on HBO. He is currently completing his first manuscript of poetry and is co-editing a new anthology with Nick Carbó, Son of the Dragon: Literary Dialogues with Asian American Men. Marlon’s most recent awards include a fellowship to the University of Miami, the Wallace Douglas Award for Excellence in Teaching, a Columbia Award for Scholarship, and two Eileen Lannan Poetry Prizes from the Academy of American Poets.

Yvonne Hortillo says about herself: si yvonne? inuumaga kung matulog. walang tulog ‘yan. di natutulog. hinihintay yung kindat ng araw sa umaga bago magpakalunod sa kumot at unan. maraming plano, ambisyosang nakakatawa. di mapigil kung tumawa, tunog asukal at malaya, tunog kapit-patalim - lahat ng ligaya, simot na simot. pareho pa rin, natatandaan ko nung high school - mahilig sa nobelang may bidang dragon: lahing aswang.

Arkaye Velasquez Kierulf is a senior chemistry student at the Ateneo de Manila University. He was a fellow of the Ateneo and UP National Writers Workshops, and a recipient of the Loyola Schools Award for the Arts.

Mikael de Lara Co graduated with a BS in Environmental Science from the Ateneo de Manila; he is supposed to be working on his MA in Panitikang Pilipino - Malikhaing Pagsulat from the same university. A fellow of the Ateneo, UST, Iyas and Dumaguete National Writers Workshops, Mikael has been writing primarily in Filipino since his college days and has yet to publish a poem in English. He plays lead guitar for the new wave/punk/blues band Los Chupacabras, and is lead vocalist for Gapos, a progressive rock/jazz/blues band with a social realist bent.

Joel M. Toledo is currently finishing his M.A. degree in Creative Writing (majoring in poetry) at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is an instructor at the Department of English of Miriam College. In 2005, he won first prize for his poetry collection, “What Little I Know of Luminosity” in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He was also awarded second place for his poetry entry in the 2004 Palanca Awards. Joel is the recipient of the 2006 National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Writers Prize for poetry, a grant for the writing and possible publication of his first book of poetry.