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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MARCH

March's featured poet and poem is Patrick Rosal and his "Uncommon Denominators," the title poem to his chapbook which received the University of South Carolina's Aiken Palanquin Poetry Series Award. UNCOMMON DENOMINATORS is now available through the Asian-American Bookseller (16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A, New York). Rosal's poems have been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards and featured in such publications as Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Literary Review, Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review, and The NuyorAsian Anthology (ed. Bino Realuyo, AAWW). Rosal teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at Bloomfield College.


UNCOMMON DENOMINATORS
For KT

I add up the times I¹ve fantasized about
women I've seen but never spoken to
and divide that by the hours
I drive past cemeteries and add again
the weight of breath in your mouth
measured in the ancient Tagalog word for yes
but the number always comes out the same

So I subtract the moon
and the smell of incense on Good Friday
trying to connect Planck¹s Constant
to the quantum moment between
a candlelit flick and the back of your neck
setting aside my 7 dreams of having sex once
with Tyra Banks who tells me God
You Filipino guys know
how to make love to a woman
and even if I tally the 10,069
channels launched by satellites
which have an asymptotic relationship
to the count of stones cast
from a sinner¹s fist raised
to the power of eight million punch-clock
stiffs heading home late
still the number comes out the same

and when a beggar pirouettes
along an expressway¹s center lane
swearing this won¹t be his last
cigarette (smoke rising from
the rust in his moustache ) I suddenly know
the acceleration of a falling body
has little to do with slipping
my mother into the ground or a whole
being greater than the sum of its parts

And if you ask what I¹m doing
with 7 loaves and 4 fish multiplied
by the square root of a dried tamarind tree
or the coefficient of friction
of a bullet on the brink of a rib
or the number of clips emptied
into an unarmed Guinean man
on a dark Bronx stoop
I¹ll tell you I¹m looking for the exact
coordinates of falling in love plus or minus
the width of a single finger
lost along the axis of your lips

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Eric Gamalinda's poetry collection ZERO GRAVITY (AliceJamesBooks) received the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Third Annual Poetry Prize (previous recipients were Arthur Sze and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge). Gamalinda's poems, fiction and essays have appeared in a diverse range of publications ranging from Harper's Magazine to the anthology In My Life: Encounters with the Beatles. His latest novel, My Sad Republic, was awarded the Philippine Centennial Prize for Fiction. The following poem is from ZERO GRAVITY:


AFTERLIVES OF THE SAINTS

Suppose the laws of warfare were based on miracles,
and they chained and locked the bodies of saints
so the Etruscans could not use them. Suppose

the best weapons did not function from belief
but custody, and those who possessed them
had, like Saint Francis, the potential of stigmata,

the gift of tongues. For even he was a self-promoter,
boasting to birds of the ever-after in which
he was talisman and trophy. And suppose a fair maiden

would become the wrath of salvation, her body
perfectly embalmed, but when they opened her grave
her marvelous longevity gave way. The fact is that

Saint Clare embodies what has become of Assisi,
where tourists, inevitable as earthquakes, lay siege
and maculate the fortifications of pietra serena.

Not too long ago her body lay on a bed of violets,
themselves impervious to decay. Then air
and moisture, the bustle of human ordinariness,

intervened, and all that is left is a life-like replica
in which bone fragments quietly work their wonders.
Faith has a way of distorting the senses,

making the world more intricate than it already is, more
mirabile dictu. Even now armies still ransack
the catacombs of the elect, and in chapels the healing

happens insidiously, perfected by repetition.
Because the most we ask for is that the saints be true:
We are driving away from the scene of the crime;

stealing a glimpse in the rearview mirror. Assisi
is an undulation of opal-colored light, no more than
a wavelength, a mirage. This is the way history and memory

invade each other, like wars waged after visions.
Look back once, see how the view melts into the crags,
and how time fades like the frescoes of Cimabue.

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Eugene Gloria's poetry collection DRIVERS AT THE SHORT-TIME MOTEL (Penguin Books) is the first book by a Filipino-American poet to be awarded the National Poetry Series prize; the judge was Yusef Kumonyakaa who says of Eugene's work: "Though many of the poems address the lingering hurt of cultural and economic imperialism, worlds coexist in the same skin through magical imagery. Gauged by a keen eye, history is scrutinized, but through a playful exactness. These wonderful poems are trustworthy." Eugene's poem "News of Pol Pot's Capture" is reprinted with the permission of the poet and Penguin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.


NEWS OF POL POT'S CAPTURE

That night the moon over New Hampshire
wore a face I knew in high school
of a pudgy boy whose mother was a singer
and whose sister was once trapped
in a burning building. When she was a girl,
my sister and 17 of her classmates
could not leave school
because the janitor ran amok.

The moonlight on the lake glides
like Persian slippers wingtipping
on the surface of the water.
And the road with its arms
around the lake is silent and American.
In Thai, "Sasithon" stands for full moon,
a name for a woman who once saw a pair of hands
on the dashboard of my car.
Not hers, but of another who died a violent death.

In the whir of static
between Top Forty and twang, I listened
to the news report of Pol Pot's capture.
And like a man whose bowl of soup
has grown too cold to eat,
I realized that I had overdriven --
missed the road I was supposed to turn into.
In a false memory, I look back

at the burning building
that claimed my classmate's sister.
I see her moonface veiled in blue --
blue as the flame of a lit match
telling me the road I missed on the map.
I could pull over and rest my eyes.

I could sleep like an entire race
of bones underneath the tall grasses
where a man hacks and hacks
at something in the heat.
Once in a while he might stop
to examine the pattern of a tattered fabric
suspended on the tip of his machete,
and try to remember his wife.