sampaguita as alien species

Yvanna Vien Tica, Philippines

Something Nanay never said: I know more about this country than mine: somewhere I never lied: a field hanging in the fulcrum of a river’s arm or the grove of willows crystallizing in the backyard. Someone shows me a bouquet of small, sweet white flowers that taste, I imagine, like the slight breaking and broken bones of a woman under the weight of a colonizer’s pallid body. Something Nanay never said: I don’t know the name of our national flower: sampaguita, dead little white flowers, tender as the baby’s head held cradled at the turn of a stagnant river. Somehow I taste all the white people’s flowers because I’ve borrowed their tongue for so long: honeysuckle, poppy, black-eyed susans, daisies, wreaths, & boughs hanging loose on a father’s head, pallid & begging, I imagine, for a taste of a blue violet lying on the fulcrum of my arm. Something Nanay never said: I don’t want to know what happens to the men there: the fields are all raped with bodies of fathers & bled into fire: sampaguitas adorning the hood of a scythe from this land because they never knew where to go: somewhere I never lied: underneath a host of stars planted like rice, under a hut in a secluded coconut grove: some name I never said or could say because of my overdue tongue, & still: the man crashes against the weight of a woman & breaks his neck over blue violets.

Pastured
Yvanna Vien Tica, Philippines

There are many ways to bar, to keep a cow
from cutting its mouth eating grass. So
many ways to tell a girl who played
immigrant for the past seven years that she is a delusion
in the making. So many ways for her to cry
and so many ways for her to grit
her teeth when she finds out no, she cannot enter or rise with the rest of her green
card holding classmates even if her blood
sings America the Beautiful when it spills into concrete, slips into
a crack and nurses
a dandelion seed into white-haired oblivion.

Thanksgiving in Tagalog
Yvanna Vien Tica, Philippines

My mother left the turkey,
forfeited it to gaze at the window. Calls me

Anak in that beaten-up tongue, hardened
against the softer English velvet, tells me

to spread the table with spoons and forks
like the way we were civilized to shy from our hands—

American utensils trickling down the family
palms, clinking old skulls in a struggle to make out

any glass sort of tune to prove my ancestors held
water to soak those vowels in: a, e, i, o, nñ, ng—

the turkey coils inside the oven, screams
against the harsh, on the blackboard s is for snakes

shhh. The room smokes, and meanwhile
the teachers are correcting the sounds breaking

in those stubborn tongues so the balls sizzle into the mitt
in a civilized way while my mother is staring at a turkey

the pantry volunteers told her to choke
with herbs and shove into an oven as if it would

never burn the first time.

Yvanna Vien Tica is a hearing-impaired Filipina writer who grew up in Manila and a suburb near Chicago. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Filipino-American Chicago newspaper MEGAscene, EX/POST Magazine, DIALOGIST, and Hobart, among others. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The Faith Review and a Genre Editor for Polyphony Lit. In her spare time, she can be found enjoying nature and thanking God for another day.

“sampaguita as alien species” first appeared in Issue II of EX/POST Magazine

“Pastured” first appeared in The Interlochen Review

“Thanksgiving in Tagalog” first appeared in The Eunoia Review.