FEATURED POET: CRISTINA QUERRER

FOUR POEMS by Cristina Querrer

From a Retired Disco Queen

My waters, thought to be haunted


turned away many expeditions


but you discovered southwest passages,

guiding your independent craft,


your astrolabe and constellations


to the strobe-lighted platform where I danced.

There are many lives that were made of this,

just like my poor mother who endured


such cessation of sound that I could not stand

the stillness of her womb, where my penchant

for crashing endings became.

Neither are you a victim to this.


You, the circumnavigator of truth

dictating your life


to the exactitude of a compass,


charting sunrises by military standards

while I openly study the behavior of birds.

Fatherless conversations,


attracted to subterfuges,


I am an orphan in my own right—

impassive Amerasian girl at the nail salon,

a detached disco queen at the go-go bar.

No equal transaction

because I dance for you

and you never fill


my heart’s deep pockets.

I have unloaded


my past residences upon you.


You crassly offer me a sparse word.

I amble off the dance floor.

Mango Man

I remembered the vendor


who pushed his squeaky cart


of sweet corn, sugarcane, and mangos


in the sweltering afternoons,


through residential subdivisions of my past.

And as a child chased him down,


with my only peso in hand, anxious to fulfill

that nameless need in my early dawn.


Just as if the sky turned the colors


of burnt orange and the world smelled


of incense and my grandmother's coconut oil,

I walked this path before


with many faces of my past.

I returned here with the same perplexities—

gastric questions that bubble inside,


back pains of my former loss.


My mother will one day look on smiling,

finally, at rest in her hammock

contented for once about the heat,


as I will hear again that mango man

calling out the objects of my affection.

One day pockets will overflow with pesos

and I will never rummage through


that garbage pile of pits, memory. Just as if

the Bataan Death March of my life

took me down cramped corridors

separating me from my husk—


it is here that I am still eased


by visions of water buffaloes and rice paddies,

fish set out to dry in the tangerine sun,

and the store owner sleeping

with the fly swatter in his hand.

Something unexplainable ferments,


something in my sultry past falls short,


and far beyond my torturous initiation to salaciousness.

Yes, my first lover experienced me here. A

foreigner himself.

A part of that melding masses of ants

crawling into the crevices of the cabarets,

of go-go girls and GIs, San Miguel beer,

and rotting mango seeds.

My Daughter, Where Will You Go?

Like walking effigies

easily dismantled

bodies of paint-by-numbers,

so easily constructed

perpetually suspended

myths that never tell about

itself

that never know where

the center of the storm

is

My daughter, where will you go into

the night, when many days go like this?

I offer you my words,


your great-grandmother's ghost

Go into it carefully


as if it is a dark


forest


like the mouth of the jungle

I had no one to say to me that is

not me in her

or


that is her in me

that we should hold hands

and not be strangers

As if we were born like this

for a reason

To talk a language of forgiveness

to the suicides

To Begin Again

No heavy furniture to weigh on me now,

just a million of tangled hangers


and piles of paper push me


to throw all forgotten things:

old receipts, plane tickets,


dire poems, an old picture of an ex-lover

uncovered in between them—


I never pause, don’t blink an eye—

never knew who I was then.

A younger woman smiling at the camera


with my beau, whose name I barely remember,

lifting my glass, toasting life.


I don’t care for filled rooms anymore,


even forgotten how to stay up at night.

I only care now that my next hefty courage


comes in the sound of my voice,


the shape of this room,


with me in it, reading, transfiguring,


imprinting myself into these new battlements.

Amazing my body still moves, though, still dances,

remembers all the complex steps.

*****

Cristina Querrer was born and raised in the Philippines, post Vietnam War, during the Marcos regime, pre-Mount Pinatubo eruption, as a U.S. Air Force military child. She graduated high school from former Wagner High School, Clark Air Force Base, Philippines, in 1985. Her works have appeared in The Milo Review, The Adirondack Review, The Fairfield Review, Stirring and in print anthologies such as Pinoy Poetics, Babaylan, Bombshell, The Mom Egg and Field of Mirrors. Her first chapbook, The Art of Exporting, was published by dancing girl press in 2012. Querrer received her MFA in Creative Writing from National University and her BA in Creative Writing with a minor in Visual Arts from Eckerd College in St Petersburg, FL. She was an English instructor at the College of Micronesia and various other colleges. She is currently residing in the Tampa Bay Area. You can view her art ad literary blog online at http://yourartsygirl.blogspot.com