Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish
Here, inside of this sentence stretching toward
the Pacific, set deep, still on Kumeyaay land,
here, in the thick historical present, out front
of a foreclosed single family home, past a
dried-dead yellow lawn, past plastic-covered
furniture of the evicted, out front of a one-
bedroom apartment, each wall lined with
bunkbeds for migrants since long ago, here,
out front of another out-of-business Filipino
restaurant, here, along a sidewalk of abandoned
shoestrings, receipts, and grocery lists, here,
on the corner of Black Mountain and Mira Mesa,
the smell of beef broth and basil and gasoline
and turmeric and cilantro and fresh asphalt and
deep-fried rice paper, here, waiting at the bus
stop with students, tech workers, lolas y abuelitas
in straw sunhats and visors, their reused plastic
Target bags sagging with bleached white socks
and the salvaged of yesterday's chichiria, here,
where many un-English languages are familiar
music, familiar longing, familiar refusal, a tin
and garlic glottal syllable every now and again,
here, now at this very bus stop, amidst the screech
of brakes and the hum of traffic, here, in all
of these clauses, lives, so quietly, so humbly,
at the helm of divine laughter, this unremark-
able man, his brownness an archipelago of
eczema and radiation pink, his nailbeds tinted
chemical green, his oversized blue and orange
Pendleton full of single threads running and
running, his unevenly hemmed groundskeeper
khakis consistently starched, his Florsheim
loafers freshly polished, Solvang cap still
stiff on his head, still stained with coffee
and brandy, his same spectacles bent, resting
crooked and uneasy, here: a labor of a man,
who at the end of this sentence, this mourning,
this story, shall be remembered simply as pare,
amigo, kasama, compa, lolo, asawa, tatay, tito,
tío, uncle, manong, abalayan, stranger, ninong,
labor, that widower who could never petition
his familia, that sometimes lettuce-picker,
sometimes strawberry-picker, laid-off bellhop,
laid-off postal worker, freelance maintenance
worker, freelance custodian, retired grounds-
keeper, comrade who plays chess and waxes
geographic with fellow elders at the sacred
Starbucks on Camino Ruiz, that 82-year-old
who when diagnosed with walking pneumonia
again and again this whole past year eventually
for one last time stops by Seafood City to scarf
down the saltiest of dilis, who drinks a six-pack
of Red Horse and cries through his throat, who
boards the bus, and sings for the dead at every
streetlight altar along the boulevard, who travels
down the 805, to La Jolla Village Drive, where
he once went on strike at the Marriott, where
he once at a hotel bar fantasized about rushing
a white man for calling him stupid and dirty,
down to the VA hospital, here, now, he smokes
a handful of Reds, and hikes down the hill, passes
archways, condos, and mansions where wealthy
white people live, where university chancellors
hoard bones of indigenous people, down to
La Jolla shores, across grass, into sand, past
college kids drinking cheap vodka in water bottles,
past weakly lit bonfires, that lakay who at this
moment remembers then forgets who he is, what
is ghost, what is bone, what is subject, he is
migrating again, this old man who for this one
last time shall remember then forget his name,
his song, lyrics aflame and escaping through
cracks in his lungs, this lolo who disrobes himself
one final time of that pressed Pendleton and those
starched khakis, this lolo who, here, now is walking
and whistling along the shore, still in white briefs,
white socks, Solvang cap, and bent spectacles, this
lakay, whose skin is quickly becoming all scales,
who is walking and whistling into the waves further
and further until he needs to tread, then swim, and
now he is swimming and swimming, and his arms
become fins, his legs twist into a thick tail, his
walking pneumonia no longer, canals of water in
his lungs no longer, no longer cracks in his breath,
or his throat, or his lungs, or his song, his body now
gills all over, now there, all the way over there,
beyond this, beyond this sentence, is that lakay, his
body now bursting and bursting so full of the Pacific.
NOTES
This sentence was composed through several iterations of performance, revision, remapping, and undoing. Some of that creative process is documented in the series Sweet Manong, Sweet Fish: A Labor of Grief: The Uncle; The Homie; The Collaborator; The Colleague; The Cousin (The Operating System: Field Notes, 2020).
A version of this poem was also published in Issue 2 Mahal: Who We Are, What It Cost Us, & How We Love.
Jason Magabo Perez (he/him) is the author of Phenomenology of Superhero (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017). Perez’s prose and poetry have also appeared in Witness, TAYO, Eleven Eleven, Entropy, The Feminist Wire, The Operating System, and Faultline. Previous Artist-in-Residence at Center for Art and Thought, Perez currently serves as Community Arts Fellow at Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies and Associate Editor for Ethnic Studies Review. Perez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos.