Ways a Brown Girl Inhabits Herself
I have left my body many times. Once I misplaced myself
inside my mother’s voice. She was peeling a carrot with
a small knife, the blade so thin it sang against the curling
skin. I was ten, or maybe thirty. Her hands smelled of crushed
peppercorns. She was surrounded by other wild-haired women,
all of them loud and speaking in the language of ancestral salt
and smoke and spite, of burnt rice and lullabies, of love sharp
enough to slice seeds. I folded into the orange slivers, made
a nest for myself there. Another time, I was threaded into
a strand of hair caught in a doorframe, a soft tether between
rooms. Even then I loved myself enough to linger. I have also
been tucked into my grandmother’s prayer book, its spine split
like her heel, pages soft with use. When I’m not here, I am with
the girl I used to be, barefoot by the flood drain in front of the
house I outgrew, stringing santan flowers into bracelets, offering
each one to gods I couldn’t yet name. Sometimes I am the scent
that lingers after my lover leaves. Sometimes I am the scent that
keeps him. I have hidden in spoons, in the sound of the sugar-
streaked laugh of my sister before she learned how to wound.
I am the cassette tape you rewind forever with a pencil. When
I’m not in my body, I go where brown girls are not required
to explain their magic. Some days I vanish into a jeepney’s
exhaust and emerge at the edge of the city with a new name
no one can pronounce. I inhabit the rice husk, cling to the
banana bruising on someone’s arms. I rest beside the holy
rot of my country’s wet season. I press my face to the soil.
Letter to a Sampaloc Tree
I don’t know if you remember me. I have nowhere else
to bring these questions but to someone older than rain.
I used to walk by you when I was younger, picking up
pods then peeling them open, tasting the sweet-sour
caramel of your flesh like it might unlock a secret, then
spitting out the seeds as if they’ve burned my tongue.
Your arms have always been heavy with memory and
I didn’t know how to respect that. Well, dear friend,
I’ve come back older now and a little more in need
of your company. Your shadow leans in and towers
over my head. I see the way your roots still braid and
burrow into the soil. Where was I going all those years
I ran away from your canopy? What was so important
that I couldn’t wait? Look at all your bark thick with years.
What a splendid fool I was not to notice what time does to us.
Tell me your word for hunger, because I am always wanting.
Do you know this feeling? Is this why you keep reaching
for the light? Tell me your word for god. Is it everything
that does not need to name itself? I touch your callouses
and I break my own heart. Forgive me, I am only trying
to be here. I want to believe in what I cannot see. Tell me
how to love this world. I want to be more than what I was.
T. De Los Reyes is a Filipino poet and the author of And Yet Held (Bull City Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Epiphany, Waxwing, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. A 2025 VONA Summer Fellow and recipient of a Narrative Shifts residency from The Seventh Wave, she has been nominated for Best of the Net and was a finalist for the Pleiades’ Prufer Poetry Prize. She is the founder of Read A Little Poetry. Read more of her work at tdelosreyes.com