Kabel Mishka Ligot
—
Kuwán
[noun/verb/adjective] Filipino (standardized Tagalog): 1. a placeholder for a word that eludes the speaker at the moment of utterance; 2. a filler in speech, signaling a pause to think while indicating that the speaker has not finished speaking.
A quick search for definition
reveals it came from the Spanish
¿CUÁL? meaning which? meaning somewhere, at some point
in language’s history, ¿CUÁL?’s lingering /l/ of questioning became
the /n/ of finality, cutting off a flight path, meaning
I must yet again make peace with a word, attribute it to
another synod of mouths. This system isn’t always
what has taken place: the province of Antique was named
not after the Castilian adjective ANTIGUO, not LA ANTIGÜEDAD,
meaning old, meaning DE ÉPOCA, meaning paradise
found again in the East Indies, meaning primordial
state, presumed dead. Instead, the land was christened
ANTIQUE after HAMTÍK, a word in Kinaray-a: large black ants that limned
the trees in droves—the soil, the island. Onyx antennae and thorax cocooned
the coast conquistadores thought
they discovered, they so deftly mapped. Now, say KUWÁN
when the word evades you: Please pass me the KUWÁN. The chicken you cooked
is very KUWÁN. Something— KUWÁN —happened last night
when we were at KUWÁN. It is said KWA in the dunes and mountains up North, last letter
evaporating into the fog and thicket of uncertainty. KWA, naming an open yawn. Further
down into the archipelago the word is pregnant with urgency
and intent: KU'AN. Nearly the monitor lizard in the backyard clicking KU
AN, KU AN, almost
the crickets cajoling the furrowed field
into bloom. KU'AN as if suddenly stumbling, mind’s foot missing
the last step on the staircase. We hiccup and limp
towards doubt: KUWÁN, KWA, KU’AN, cobweb on the fringes
of comprehension’s guestroom. I bumped into KUWÁN this morning, she’s become
so much more KUWÁN since I last saw her. KUWÁN meaning taxonomy’s holy tug
of war, meaning word nearly found. Meaning please, dearest
proxy, postpone recognition.
Obscure and blanket; conjure
a veil of insects crawling over a known thing.
Umay
There’s a word for when you’ve grown
sick of what you’re eating, no matter how much
you wanted it when you were hungry.
The meal’s oil no longer a glossy blanket floating on the earthy
sauce, but a whole new atmosphere, pool of amber, stained
glass roof housing the meager meat and vegetables.
The rice, now limp, begins to sop up the spill.
Suddenly the whole plate is covered in grease; your throat,
the diner walls glisten in a sheen of lard. You trudge
outside, ankle-deep in a current of fat. The sun’s a tanker
on its side, graying the sky’s ocean in swathes. It’s all inside
and outside your body now: heady smell of gasoline
unfurling from the highway, each passerby’s face
a tableau of fried-egg stains on a paper towel. The city air
bubbles into a stew of moist dust and bones. The restless
sleeper of your tongue starts to turn and drown
in the sticky bedsheets of your maw. I made us
dinner once, slicing peppers with ease, until the knife
I held loosely slid across the chopping board
in an impressive glide. The kettle sang
and clouded the kitchen air. The nick in my palm
pulsed and out marched the words I once held inside like a crime
scene on the kitchen counter: I’m not sorry. I want
to leave. I lick my wounds, anoint my mouth. I’m not sorry at all.
Juan dela Cruz
1) Apparently, there was a Juan dela Cruz. Son of Jewish conversos,
a Catholic mystic who wrote sexy poems
to God. He was a saint, too, but he’s no Filipino,
never set foot on the islands, never donned
a salakót. Nothing to do with the caricature
standing in for a hundred million undulating bodies, begging
to be named. If we aren’t ethnically ambiguous
religious nuts stroking the tender
flesh of our stigmata, babbling O cautery that freshens! O treasure
of a wound! in an unlit cell, then what are we?
Not saints but a demonym, some filigreed statistic. (2) A Scot,
Robert McCullough, wrote for The Manila
Times in 1902, did court reports for the first English newspaper
circulated in the colony. Christened each
unnamed criminal in his ledes with the most common
name he could muster: JUAN DELA CRUZ STEALS SUCKLING
PIG FROM MARKETPLACE. JUAN DELA CRUZ SENTENCED
TO PRISON FOR MURDER OF BROTHER. Until now I owe even my anonymity
to an archive of petty crimes. (3) My Uncle Sam is a real person, too.
He drives a tiny car; he is deaf in one ear, blind
in one eye. He is a registered Republican, lives in the outskirts
of Vegas, clay-colored townhouse plastered floor to ceiling
with Kansas University memorabilia. A smiling bird’s
eyes track my every move in their suburban
house. He loves Filipino food and watching
football. He is terrified of Arabs, suspicious of Mexicans
and sends me a check in the mail from time to time
calls it ‘foreign aid.’ For lunch I cook Korean noodles
and he constantly asks if the dish is Northern
or Southern. (4) In Henderson, jets bisect the blue sky with furrows
of white. His wife, my grandmother’s sister, refills the glimmering
bird feeders in the backyard. At night, coyote
nibble on their plastic cactus like Halloween treats. Spilt sugar
water from the feeders crystallizes on their pavement. While watching
last night’s broadcast of Filipino news on cable he inquires
about the Muslims living in the south of the country: are they
immigrants? and I tell him they’ve been there just as long, possibly
longer than my own ancestors have. A part of me somewhat
envious at his audacity to think that, like him, I hail from a place
so desirable, where others want to live. (5) Is this the suffering
required in order to be canonized? He isn’t even my uncle, just a man
from Nebraska. But surely he must be family
to a people who’ve coined a term even for “parent
of your son or daughter-in-law.” In his presence, sleeping
in his wallpapered guestroom, Sean Hannity bleeding
through the hardboard walls, I become the Filipino
everyman, squashed in the newsprint corners
of an editorial cartoon. Out of my head grows a straw hat. I turn
browner, walk barefoot, juggle coconuts and carabao
milk across their immaculately vacuumed floor.
(6) Tomorrow, I will scour all of Vegas for a river,
do his laundry with my bare hands, scrub until the stars
and stripes on his top hat glisten so bright he won’t see
how I’ve metamorphosed in the hinterlands of his vision.
Kabel Mishka Ligot was born and raised in and around Metro Manila in the Philippines. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received the 2019 Jerome Stern Teaching Award. Mishka’s work has been published or is forthcoming in RHINO, Waxwing, The Margins and other journals. A recipient of the Don Belton scholarship at the Indiana University Writers’ Conference and a Tin House Summer Workshop alumnus, he currently lives in the Midwest, where he works at a high school library.
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