Planting - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

They worked together on the yard, the little family, sweating and dirt streaked. The father bent over, intent on helping his daughter plant her tiny grass seeds. They always did this in the spring: tilled a tiny vegetable garden, dug up the flowerbeds, patched the holey places in the grass.

Many times, they didn’t even live at a place long enough to see the shivering seedlets straighten. But no matter how many places they lived or how many times they moved, springtime was a ritual: all of them, bent over the damp earth, coddling it, requesting it to nurture their offerings. It mattered deeply somehow, this planting. Not as an effort to beatify the house for the next people—the houses were always rentals.

Somehow, the act of planting had become as symbolic as the actual growth. It was a living in the moment, a way to bond that made no sense to anyone else, because the planting was for no other purpose but to be together. It was a surrender to time, a realization that it is only the present that one truly possesses. This is the reason they were digging, using rusty garden spades, the daughter clutching a green plastic watering can in her small hand.

Rememory - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

I miss you in parts, as a whole,
and both in various combinations:
just the eyes
or sometimes the eyes
and the fingertips.

Talking In Titles (Our Parallel Universe) - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

What if everything you typed outside the lines was false and
(only what you wrote within a pair of parenthesis could ever be true.
Consequently,) people communicated through subject headers?
We would be left with a coded and condensed vocabulary, forcing
everyone to say what they really mean. (I adore words, I despise words;
their simplicity and complexity. Precision results in clarification,
they told me, but I only got confused by the subtleties. How many
ways can you really say help? Or love?) Things mean what they mean,
at least in theory. We could have pop-up windows outside our heads
with our hidden meanings unveiled, forcing us to be honest with the world.
(I love you, I have always loved you. What have we done with the past
ten years?) I am a ghost, I feel like a ghost, sometimes I long to be a ghost.
(I have found that time and space are interchangeable. From long distances,
you must shout loudly to get your meaning across. Therefore, few words are used, but
much effort is invested in sending them off. Although the words may arrive as
whispers, they are very important…they have traveled a long way.) Ghosts know
of what I speak. They are never verbose, in their communications. They reach
out from their world, saving energy to hurl their sparing words across the void.
(i miss you has a million and one meanings.) People always misinterpret
ghosts, you know. Partly because they frighten us.

(talk to you later, you reply.)

(are you thinking minutes or years?)

The Party - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

The people arrived. By the hundreds it seemed, although of course there were only fifteen people total and the multiplying was only the result of her inherently drunk-with-dread state of mind. She loathed it, the clomping and hugging and gasping over the elaborately set table, the pouring of drinks and the dispersing of the masses into discernable clumps, varied by their common interests. She helped stir the peach fizzy schnapps drink with listless vigor. Something to do, ah yes. Stay awake, look polite, laugh at all the right times. Save the yawning for private, snatched moments when most normal people would be snatching kisses. However, you cannot kiss and yawn at the same time, and since yawning is far less socially acceptable, it must be hidden.

The trick was to look intrigued, which allowed the mind to wander to faraway places unattainable during daylight, uninterrupted hours. Galleries of unexplored thoughts, moments. Such as what happened to the mysterious boy with the carefully gelled shock of brown hair, the artist who never told her where he was going, and one day just disappeared off the face of the earth? He was lost in another galaxy, she supposed. What would she say if she saw him again? Quite probably the same types of things she was saying to these people here, exclaiming about nonsense while casting an eye about for a graceful escape.

The guests played a game, after a while, a guessing type of game in which one person rolled the dice to select a letter. The players would then fill out a card of lists with words beginning with that letter. It was a game that lent itself to cheating and a bit of a stretch, and you could tell so much about people by the words they chose. An object in a refrigerator, beginning with an M….would it be mustard or mascarpone? Would an item that was thrown away, starting with the letter G, be garbage or goggles?

It was on the “F” roll that she noticed him. Droopy eyes; eager, wide smile; almost handsome but too earnest. He chose odd words; it attracted her attention. He wasn’t an intellectual; although nicely dressed, he seemed rather earthy. She’d seen him pull up in a Jaguar, which appeared very out of character. She could imagine him as a woodland guide, dressed in polar fleece and staring earnestly at the stars.

They went about the circle, shouting out their words. Things found in the ocean, that was the turn. Fish, said a curly haired brunette, and fungi was offered up by a slight, pretty girl with straight, swingy hair. It came round to him, and he said boisterously, farmer. A squeal of protest went up from the group. There are no farmers in the ocean! For that matter, anything could be found in the ocean if one dropped it in. Fans, for instance, or flat tires. He looked calmly at everyone. “Of course,” he said. “Those would all be correct answers. Because you can find anything in an ocean. It doesn’t have to be there naturally. It only has to be there.”

She thought about correct answers. Of course, there were never any. Every answer was correct, to some degree and to somebody. By the same token, every person was somewhat justified in what they did. Where they went. How they felt. The boy in another galaxy. Each guest. And herself. She stood from the shouting circle and removed herself, quietly, to her own silent room.

You Are Starving - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

You Are Starving
Life is cold, contrary
to what they told us.
Life is not warm.
It seeps into the bone,
making you shudder
as you try to refuse it.
The dark is warm,
closer to a shroud or a blanket
than the light.
Night envelopes the soul comfortably,
unlike day which pierces your sleep
and scorches your retinas.
Conversation and sex become something
bearable and dirty in the sun.
The sun has conquered unfairly.
Help me.

All I want is to see the stars.

Abortion - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

One plus one is three.
     (Darling, we were never good at math.)
One plus one is three,
one plus one is two-and-a-half,
one plus one is two.
     (There. Simple subtraction works every time.)

Culture of Fear - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

I’m not from the Philippines, nor have I ever been to visit, despite the pressures of my great-aunt, known only as Nana, and my grandmother. It doesn’t seem as cultured as Europe or as artistic as Tibet—just hot and ominously frightening. When I was little, I was told stories of various Filipino creatures of the night—the aswang, who assumes the form of a human being and even marries, but eats corpses at night, and the manananggal, witches who disassemble themselves and send their thread-thin tongue into sleeper’s unaware ears and noses to devour their innards. These were different than the vampires and werewolves of America, which I was familiar with and knew could be overcome, captured or killed with silver bullets and crucifixes. Filipino beings were darker and foreign, undanted by charms, holiness or courage. They were angry, not to be reasoned with or bribed. And these creatures seemed to exist in equal quantities and force to real people in the Philippines.

Superstitions abound in the Filipino culture. Even in the enlightened, Americanized home that I grew up in, my mother propagated folktales. If my sister and I didn’t wake up and get ready for church early enough, the devil was sitting on our eyelids. If we didn’t let her blowdry our long hair after we took baths, and chose to go to bed with wet tresses, we would find ourselves blind when we woke up in the morning. If I bit my cheek and it bled, someone was thinking about me. And she hadn’t even invoked any of the monsters yet.

The list is endless and the assortment frightening. After I was told about the tiyanaks—monsters who assume the form of tiny children in order to lure you into the woods, then revert to their original forms to devour you—I wasn’t able to hold my baby cousins for a month. A monster becoming a man or woman seemed permissible and understandable; grownups were often cruel. But a small child was innocent, and seemed to me should be exempt from this horrible impersonation. If you couldn’t trust a baby, you couldn’t trust anyone. I, in fact, put my own two-year-old brother in the deep freezer with his arms zipped inside his sleeper for a minute or two, partly because I thought it was funny, partly to see if he was a tiyanak. He yelled quite a bit, but didn’t turn into anything other than a crying boy. I let him out, deluged with protests from my sisters that I was going to kill him. You can’t trust anyone.

Filipinos are seen as the happy-go-lucky Asians, always with a laugh and a funny story. Maybe that’s to deal with the inexplicable fact that babies and dwarves and giants and centaurs are all bad. There are no good mystical creatures. Even the fairies are evil. Any of them can take you to the grave. So all there is left to depend on is a good laugh or two.

One of my uncles is a complete jokester. He taught all the cousins to pull his finger whenever he needed to pass gas. He tells the most hilarious stories in the world. He’s also my only uncle to get a divorce—after his first wife tried to scratch his eyes out. Also, his son is mentally handicapped and will depend on him into adulthood. This uncle once told me that those who can laugh are given more to suffer. I tried not to laugh very much after that, in case it was true.

I wonder now, as an adult, why I have so many parasomnias that even Xanax can’t quell. I grind my teeth, pull my hair, cry out in fear in the middle of the night. I live hundreds of thousands of miles away from the tiyanaks and the kapres—in a world where science and facts rule supreme, where fanged creatures and winged maidens are only characters in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But perhaps, deep inside, I can never escape my heritage. I am Filipino. The dark creatures are in my blood. And I dream their dreams.

Language Has Not Yet Evolved - by Jacqueline Ostrowicki

language has not yet evolved
to the point where it represents
the world fully.

some words are missing.

like the name for what passes
between us; that certain kiss, wordless and grasping,
whole yet broken, and always
under the cover of dark.

what to call the persistent tangle of
socks, shoes, jeans; our miscellaneous items of clothing
that writhe upon the floor as if they
possessed a life separate from our own?

or the juncture between sleep and wake—
that half-second before the sun breaks open
the shell of the sky—when i rouse, sensing your even
breath, hidden beneath covers only a foot away;
and i know (deeply and vaguely) that i have only passed
through you, like light?

these nights remain a mystery;
infinitely longer yet shorter than day,
urgent in their transience.
a lovers' equinox can never exist.

i have happened on a fugitive.
there is no word for this.

the dark has not yet slipped away; vanished
like sorrow or a tune. it is still here, still
playing, and your breathing remains an
unbroken promise, some kind of enchantment i've
fallen into.

this is a moment i can touch, but am not allowed to keep.

there is a word for this, i know;
but cannot remember it yet.
it is coming to me, this word;
winging its way through layers of light,
but it hasn't quite arrived.