This Publisher's Column shall feature developments related to Filipino literature. Each monthly update also shall include a featured poet and poem. For comments and suggestions, please e-mail Meritage Press Associate Editor Jade Afable at Jade@meritagepress.com



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February's featured poets are all of the winners of the 2001 Meritage Press Holiday Poetry Contest judged by poet, editor, critic and teacher Nick Carbo:

First Place: "Wonder" by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
Second Place: "Ode to the Sandwich Makers" by Tony Robles
Third Place: "3 Weeks in Aspen" by Bert Florentino

Honorable Mention (in no particular order):
"Aiza" by Patrick Rosal
"Alaska/Filipino Bunkhouse/Lights Out" by Oscar Penaranda
"Ritual From The Book of Mistakes No. 1" by Patrick Rosal
"The Metaphor of Sunlight Can Be Carried In A Bucket" by Jon Pineda
"Thirteenth Way of Looking at a Blackbird" by Jessica Nepomuceno

THE AWARD-WINNING POEMS:

WONDER
by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

In the blackest hour,
you brought a firefly
into the house.

It barely lit up the room,
its carapace fizzling,
its wings humming
yellowgreen notes.

Nothing happened really,
nothing life-changing:
things were still in place,
Manila was still
plunged in darkness.

But I knew your heart
opened---window
whose latticework
is ribcage---for this gift
of chance, or grace.

Waiting for the electricity
to arrive, you had chanced
upon a luminous accident.

How many of us would seek
beauty in such a small space,
in your case, the body of an insect,
and welcome it as though
it were God's own flickering breath?

In some days,
words called rains fall
and we keep ourselves
unreachable under blankets.

You had to let the firefly go.

From the balcony,
you watched how it said
goodbye: laborious,
stuttering but final.

Sitting in the couch,
you remembered
that by daylight,
all fireflies are simply
erased stars.

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ODE TO THE SANDWICH MAKERS
by Tony Robles

In the financial district
the construction never
stops

concrete slabs, frozen
tongues piled silently
high

held in place by
unseen
foundation

Papers stacked
and shredded

confetti on the 1st

In the midst of this
stone graveyard is
a deli

12 noon, the
line snakes from
the door

Inside, 7 sandwich
makers behind
a glass counter

all Asian

NEXT PLEASE!
NEXT PLEASE!

With the grace of
a blackjack dealer,
they stack the salami,
ham, cheese

on bread of

white, brown, sour,
or wheat

Any sandwich, any way
you like it

Meat piled thick
mayo
mustard

sealed with
strokes of
sunlight

non-stop,
constructed
perfectly with care

The line
moving quickly
like at the
racetrack

These dealers,
these sandwich
makers

these builders

Taking the order

constructing
buildings of
bread

among the
stones

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3 WEEKS IN ASPEN
(1966 Writers Workshop)
by Bert Florentino

I wrote my wife:

"I didn't know what could be worse:
three weeks in Aspen without a typewriter. . .
or three weeks without YOU
until this beauty stood at my door last night
cradling in her downy arms,
between her décolleté
and snow-white thighs,

A SMITH CORONA! NEW! ELECTRIC!
PORTABLE! FEATHER-TOUCH!

"So, trembling, I took in
what I had been so long without. . .
and pounded away all night."

Wrote back my worried wife:

"Which
did you take that night, my dear. . .
the lady. . .
or the typewriter?"

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AIZA
by Patrick Rosal

Where Your name
means where
in Madagascar
the question a man
breathes along
the hips of his wife
in the bony
dark of Tuliara
Where Your name
means where
in Madagascar and so
should be written
in Malagasy Visaya Creole
but not here

Here your hair spills
on my lap like a thief's
riches and your hands
a pair of clumsy blessings
somewhere
at the end
of your body Here
are broken
bottles and odd
copper coins
as if I should
compare them
to your eyes Here
you become what
you already are:
a mouthful
of mango and salt
which makes me crave
the surf and speak
the word
which is a question
on an island
where children
dream of never
finding the same path
back Your name is on
their lips You might say
we are ancestors
to a race of beings
who will understand the sea
is your own tongue
or heart or anything
we suspect is partly human
and they will know
to sail into it
you have to risk
drowning
though none of us
knows when

or where Your name means
where in Madagascar
to the man
breathing
along the hips
of his wife your
name a litany
for those in the dark
who love
to lose their way

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ALASKA/FILIPINO BUNKHOUSE/LIGHTS OUT
by Oscar Penaranda

Curled up like brown puppies
they would cuddle
alone at nights or early mornings
in their spring-soggy beds
(the old-timers would have put
a slab of plywood stolen from the white machinists
under rotting mattresses
for their aching and irreplaceable backs)

each retiring under a blanket of
separate dreams
that, during the routine of neverending work,
wrap about them
like stubborn sheets of Alaskan rain and wind

thinking perhaps
of staying and living
the winter there

tired not from the skillful maneuverings
of salmon round the clock
but from
arguing all night
which one
the white woman at
the store stole a
glance at
that day

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RITUAL FROM THE BOOK OF MISTAKES NO. 1
by Patrick Rosal

Take away the man
who helps his father put a .22
dead center between a steer's eyes
and you take away the man who
turns his back before the knife blade
breaks the tender hide of the beast's throat
Take away the man who swings forward
shoveling his way through
a wagon topped off with feed
until he's red in the face
and you take away the man
who sways as though he moves with all
his weight and all the weight of fathers and
half the lineage of mothers behind him
Take away this man
and his boys whom he will beat
before any one of them becomes the fool
he has promised to leave
brawling the streets overseas
and you take away the man
who once lay down in another country
with a woman whose name
he hasn't said aloud in twenty years

Unless you've stood beside this man
who shouldn't be standing
who nine times got up and walked
out of wrecks and falls
gunfire and love
who's held up by a spine
these days more back than bone
Unless you've seen him kiss
his full-grown son on the cheek
and embrace him long enough
to pray for grace from a god he's cursed
once a week for forty years
you might not think of what it means
to drive to the highest point in Helixville
where on a good day he'll pause
in the middle of that half-paved path
overlooking the hard farm roads
fallow fields and barroom arias of his life
Unless you've swung a hammer beside him
his body braced without a flinch
against a joist to hold it straight
you might not understand
why it only takes a splinter in the thumb
to make him lie down
for a day and a half with fever
and why he might cry like a little girl
which is what he would not want
because goddammit he is not a man
until you sit in his pick-up truck and smell
the beer and cigarettes of seven generations
and you spend the hour-plus drive
in the kind of long silences only shared
between dear friends or dire enemies
or brothers This is the problem
You won't know how to thank him
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

          for Clyde Lasure

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THE METAPHOR OF SUNLIGHT CAN BE CARRIED IN A BUCKET
by Jon Pineda

They wait for low tide and walk through the slick
Thickness, each step deeper than the next
In pools that have gathered by the edge
Are schools of minnows flashing in a stir of light
Almost half a mile into the heart of the canal
It opens onto small islands of clumped cord grass
Children carry buckets filled with fish, slivers
Of silver they return to open space spreading
Sunlight on water.

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THIRTEENTH WAY OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD
by Jessica Nepomuceno

It's summer -- my jaws are looking for work.
The cold months brought gray slush
And sluggish blood.

Now that the air is heated and heavy
I am starved with wanting
To use my teeth to rip.

Some pregnant women have cravings
To chew ice, or rubberbands
-- I knew a woman expecting twins who gnawed chalk.

I have no baby to feed,
Just this curled and pulsing hunger
To feel my teeth grind on something, anyone, who?

It's a short jump from pen cap to fingernail, or better,
The buttocks of the great, fleshy man
Wheezing his way through the turnstile.

Poised for the train doors to slide aside,
A woman before me shifts in place.
Her bones glide beneath her skin,

Her licorice veins roping her arms.
I saw, as she sat, that her kneebones jutted
Beyond the hang of her thighs.

A Samaritan swung a Hefty bag down the aisle, calling,
"Anyone need a sandwich or a referral?"
The fierce-nailed receptionist to my left told him, "Feed that skinny bitch."

To divert my marrow-sucking want,
I chewed on a straw and stared above her disproportionately large head,
Where the MTA had pinned a wriggling, still-alive Wallace Stevens,

Who flicked his wings, desperate as a beetle,
Eager to show me 2 out of 13 ways
of looking at a succulent blackbird.

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THE POETS:

CARLOMAR ARCANGEL DAOANA (born 1979 in Manila) studied at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas where he majored in Literature. During his college years, he was the sole winner for poetry of the 13th Ustetika Annual Awards for Literature and served as Associate Editor of the Varsitarian, UST's official student publication, where he also edited Montage, its literary supplement. He also served as an Editorial Board member of the Flame, the official college journal of Arts and Letters. His literary works have appeared or will appear in various publications and anthologies such as Philippines Free Press, Tomas, The 1999 Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction, The 2000 Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction, Likhaan Online, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, Mirror Weekly, Musa, Eros Pinoy: An Anthology of Contemporary Erotica in Philippine Art and Poetry, Beauty for Ashes, and Oyster Boy Review (USA). He was a fellow for poetry in three national writers workshops: the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete (1998), Iligan National Writers Workshop (1999), and the UP National Writers Workshop in Baguio (2000). His recent involvements include serving as a contributor to Paragons, a book on Business Ethics, and a translator of Talim, an ethnography book on the marginal lives of ten Filipino youths. He also wrote about the experience of the diaspora in the poetry of Luisa Igloria through a research grant from the Ateneo de Manila University. Currently, he is working in his first book of poetry, Marginal Bliss. On his winning poem "Wonder," Carlomar says, "I wrote the poem for my sister who, during a blackout, had been able to catch a firefly. She brought it into the house and I saw her eyes shimmered like the sea during a full moon, obviously filled with awe in encountering such a magical creature which carries fire in its body. The event made me realize how I had become dense to the everyday miracles: light in the sky, trees laced with fog, water shattered like tears. 'Wonder' then is a cry against fixity. We must go out of our way and seek beauty in smallness which can ignite the dark chambers of our perception so that we can once once again look at the world and see fire and angels inhabiting each and every thing."

TONY ROBLES (born 1964 in San Francisco) says, "Oldest of 5 kids. Love Anchor steam beer and Chinese food." His poem "Ode to the sandwich makers" was "inspired by Lee's Deli...on Market St. I go there for lunch a couple times a week. There's about 7 sandwich makers behind a glass counter...and they're the fastest sandwich makers in the world. It's almost like being in the line at the racetrack. They deal the coldcuts like playing cards. My favorite is the Italian Salami on Sweet french bread...with mustard."

For BERT FLORENTINO (born 1931 in Sta. Rosa, Nueva Ecija), "Three Weeks" is his third published poem (the first was "Caligula" published in Caracoa in the 1970s). He says that "Three Weeks" is based on an actual incident in a writing conference in Aspen, CO. He wonders whether his reply to his wife: "I chose the typewriter" is "the triumph of art over life." A resident of New York since 1983, Bert has written mostly "sudden fiction" after twice attending Roberta Allen's 5-minute fiction-writing workshop at NYU. Previously, he published three short stories: his first in 1948 (Daily Mirror Sat. Mag.); his second in 1959 (Phil. Review); and a third in the 1970s in (Prevue mag.) entitled "Sabrina," a teleplay adapted as a "period short story" and included in Fiction by Filipinos in America, edited by Cecilia M. Brainard (New Day 1993) and later in The Portable Florentino (DLSU Press 1998). His next title: Because Life Is Too Short (e-book/CD-R or on-demand chapbook).

PATRICK ROSAL (born 1969 in Belleville, New Jersey) resides Edison, New Jersey and is the son of Ilokano immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook Uncommon Denominators which won the 2000 Palanquin Poetry Series Award. Most recently he has collaborated with painter Kim Krause and Allied Motion, dance company in residence at Penn State Altoona.

OSCAR PENARANDA (born 1944 in Barugo, Leyte) lives in San Francisco. He has been a writer since about the age fourteen. An educator since 1969, he was one of the founders of the Pilipino American Studies at S.F. State University, the first in the western hemisphere. His works are short stories, poems, plays, scripts, novels-in-progress and essays.

JON PINEDA (Born 1971 in Charleston, South Carolina) studied at James Madison University and Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist fellowship. He lives in Norfolk.

A New York resident, JESSICA NEPOMUCENO (born 1974 on Staten Island) is currently working on her Masters Degree in Education at Hunter College. A Barnard College graduate, she hopes to make her high school students fall in love, or at least lust, with the English language. She adds, "It will take more than the events of 9/11 to force her from New York City, the best damn city in the world." Jessica's poems are also featured in FLIPPIN': Filipinos on America (Eds. Luis Francia and Eric Gamalinda, Asian American Writers Workshop, New York). About her poem, she says, " I love the MTA 'Poetry in Motion' series---if anyone has an actual copy of the MTA excerpt from Wallace Steven's '12 ways of looking at a Blackbird,' by all means, let me know via email." (Her e-mail is yxatemp@hotmail.com)