Makati Cousin

If you hit thirty-nine without marrying,
our grandmother will tell
of the schizophrenic aunt in Manila
stirring instant coffee in a padded boot.
There are gingery candies our grandmother
reserves for such occasions of candor.
There is the allergy bracelet whose twirl
around her wrist she slows with a free hand.
“Listen,” she says, but her attention
is always tuned to talk shows.
Steam roars from a cast iron pot in the kitchen.

The first woman they brought to you at twenty-eight,
at the end of your dissertation defense,
had a bluish mole by her temple
that twitched when she talked.
The second said, over a plate of boiled peanuts
in your parents’ kitchen: “I always have these dreams?
of the world? casually ending?” It didn’t work with her.
There were inhospitalities in the bedroom,
her queasiness at the stretch marks tallied on your thigh.
Relatives from other provinces praised
the beauty of such women. Mostly, you found them
laboring in pantsuits at cosmetics companies.
None could play banduria. None could sing kundiman.

But the TV was always on. Since the summer of 1986,
it had been, another withering voice
you hear and pay your wifeless attention.

If you hit thirty-nine without marrying,
you will stop caring about your gaping pores,
your overbite, your flat nose. You will see
the candied ginger crawling sugared across silk roses,
across the tabletop tiled with photographs
of the schizophrenic aunt, like a murky golem,
smashing every decaf-stained mug in the house,
leaving clay trails. She hears Jesus only in her left ear,
remembers Manila like a Kandinsky: lines, half-circles,
squares, and lines. “That’s what will happen one day”
—our grandmother, brandishing ripped nylons,
cataracts, and bent back, says—“to you.”

When you, a student, marched on Malacañang Palace
before the raids, the disappearances, and Imelda’s shoes,
time had already begun its folding
and now it sits in a drawer,
the neck too small, the wool distasteful, piled and unwieldy.

When Auntie Sinta watches her teleseryes,
she does not sit. She stares in space.
Her housecoat, worn and thinning, shifts.
She twists unruly hairs back into place.

Copyright © 2024 by Jake Ricafrente. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“To know history is to know yourself, said Filipino national hero José Rizal. So it was confusing to live and write in the Philippines a few years back, where gone was every historical and cultural reference from before the 1970s that my grandparents and their children carried with them to the States. My people shared memories as incantations, often repeating little anecdotes and object lessons at the dinner table for the bright reward of courage, for example, or the consequences of being alone. I returned home with stories I repeat now, too; though that Manila also ceased to exist the moment I boarded my plane, following the very same route my family took more than a half-century ago.”
—Jake Ricafrente