San Maló by Luisa A. Igloria

San Maló
Luisa A. Igloria

             No birds, no boats
are visible on the water, which roils
and foams as if an acreage of cotton
rippled from a whip or a prod, above
and below. You could say it doesn’t take
much to feel how little influence
we have in a world we once thought
we could make our home. My people leaped
ashore from the blue-black hold of a three-
masted ship, sick of salt-winds, aching
for the remembered tenderness of bodies
before they wore a harness or bent
under cargoes of cotton and silk,
amber, cassia bark. Never mind
that the bruise from such a severance
might not heal. Never mind that water—
old sojourner, restless tenant—
would still wind through the centuries,
through houses on stilts in the middle
of an estuary, before fanning
back out into the sea.

 

 

 

 

              “Saint Malo was the first permanent settlement of Filipinos and
              perhaps the first Asian-American settlement in the United States….
              The settlement may have been formed as early as 1763 or 1765 by
              Filipino deserters and escaped slaves of the Spanish Manila galleon
              trade.” – Wikipedia

MARGINALIA

1.
My people come from islands. We have always been touching water, even when we’re not in it. We know how to bend without breaking.

2.
There are days when I think of water and feel something ancient wake inside me. Not longing exactly—more like recognition. A grief that doesn’t belong only to me, but lives in the blood. In the bones.

3.
I think about everything we lost so that we could survive. How we bent the knee to the coloniser and to the god they brought us to replace our gods. How we gave up our names so they could name us again.

4.
I think about what it means to carry memory like salt in the mouth.

5.
Some wounds don’t close, but they don’t always bleed either. They become part of the terrain. Like the sea beneath a stilt house. Always moving. Always returning.