Amulet by Jason Bayani

Author:Jason Bayani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938912191
Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing

MAGKAMPO

I.

The hornet’s nest was a muddy heart pulsing

on the end of a long brush field, a trench lullaby

I still loved at ten, before I learned how to curl

a frail heart into a fist.

I was nothing like my cousins,

who rumbled in the waking world

and moved like loose rocks over surrendering hills.

They stood there arguing over who would be

the first to stir the nest,

so I grabbed the biggest rock I could find,

to prove I wasn’t soft

and I could break beautiful things.

II.

I always thought there was something really weird

about a whole lot of Filipinos camping.

Not even three days in the deep woods

and we couldn’t go one without somebody using the gas grill

to cook up a pot of rice.

In the Philippines, my father tells me,

the act of camping isn’t recreational,

it’s what you did when you didn’t have a home.

And yet, every summer I was made to learn

how to find a place of quiet

where the sound of rustling leaves occurs on my body,

I learned how the stars should really look

when I draw them in my notebook,

and I walked on the world before everything

under my feet became pavement.

III.

We got pulled off the hike

by the bread crumb trail of heaving panting,

right into an orchestra of lush and mud

buried in the two-backed beast of a sloppily-built biker

and a woman he called “Mama”

sliding across each other like two slabs of warm butter.

My older brother sent me to move in closer

and see if there was anything we could steal.

Crouching behind a rotting tree

I couldn’t help thinking how much more precious

this woman’s face became against his palm,

how the centrifugal force of a kiss is

more real than what you see on TV.

When he pulled off her, walking away to complain about the bees,

she lay there, bare and open,

introducing me to a whole series of questions

I didn’t even know how to ask.

I was as prepared for this as I was to find her

looking back at me:

shaking her head and smiling like my mother did

when she would tell me I was growing up too fast.

IV.

That night, my loss of innocence became

the running joke around the campfire.

My mother took a seat next to me;

I was sure I would be punished.

Instead, I drifted inside of her hard pause,

her hushed mother’s prayer to the gods

of Please Don’t let Me Fuck This Up.

She wiped the ashes off my face and asked

if I wasn’t too big now to let my mommy hold me.

I shook my head, closed my eyes,

nuzzled my head against her.

The low crackling of fire

turned to a music box in my head.

V.

My father once bought me a cardboard clubhouse

I saw on the back of a cereal box. After he put it together

I fell backwards onto it and the whole thing collapsed.

It sounded just like the nest did when the rock left my hand,

like another thing I wouldn’t be able to undo,

the sound of a thousand hornets suddenly woken from slumber.

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