Moving Season
In the morning, my arms would be sore, too tender
to fully straighten. I had spent the weekend passionately
Swiffering our friends’ emptying apartments, the two of us
waving goodbye to piano-heavy U-Hauls rattling
into the glassy hour before sunset. But the real culprit
must have been my deadlifting form, my desperate battle
with boxes swollen with our friends’ cherished belongings,
though you praised me for my strength, though you made sure
to carry the heavier things. It was dark by the time we finished
a slow dinner at the nearby Chinese restaurant, the easy walk home
even easier with you slotted between me and the occasional fast car.
I was tired and, I confess, a bit delirious with the irrational sad
I can usually stomach, a flimsy version of me you had not seen yet.
Sometimes it’s diffi cult to be alive, I said, and in the same breath,
Sorry, I get like this sometimes. And you reached over, saying nothing,
easing the to-go container of noodles from my fingers, gentle as you
lifted that small weight from me, warm as you took my hand.
Aubade with FDA Bans on Imported Filipino Sauces
My stomach has always been
as strong as I need. I grew up eating
unrefrigerated day-old rice, don’t understand
what all the ruckus is about. I love leftovers
for breakfast: wilted lumpia in red sauce, bloody
pork stew and stinging vinegar fumes, oily goat
kaldereta still overflowing from the pot. Somehow
my mother can’t handle that gamey, offbeat taste,
the chocolate color of dinuguan, or non-breakfast foods
for breakfast, but the most American thing about me
is that I’ll have what I want. Just for this morning,
I’ll make a normal breakfast: livery-sweet
Mang Tomas dolloped over sun-yellow eggs and rice
that’s been waiting in the fridge too long. I know
we’re in the end times because the government
is taking even my favorite sauce, my banana ketchup,
my fermented shrimp paste. But I won’t give
anyone the pleasure of a heartbroken goodbye.
I’ll venture into the dirty depths of my fridge.
I’ll crack open a new sauce bottle.
I’ll cherish every last drop.
Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her work can be found in The Margins, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere, and she is also the author of the chapbooks Not Flowers (Variant Literature, 2022) and There Are No Filipinos in Mississippi (Porkbelly Press, forthcoming). She earned her MFA from the University of Mississippi.