It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
—for my mother She wore a tongue collapsing between a native ring and a Westerner’s thunder, traced her name from a typhoon’s mouth– its petrichor bearing Haiyan’s accent. She married the maid’s broom, cleansing boats across the Pacific’s lips of marine backwash, backwash, backwash; oceans warbling in English and Pampango. Somewhere in the belly of her province nanay lit votives, holy in glass sheath. She was brought to the Americas without a language to mother, absent of its flame. What remains prophetic of the Immigrant? Bodies of neighborhoods reimagined, bodies of borders exposed, origin melting into colorless waters.
Momo Manalang is a queer Filipino-American writer and community organizer. She is the Vice-Chair of GABRIELA New York, a militant women’s organization fighting for National Democracy in the Philippines with a socialist perspective. Her work entails waging local campaigns in defense of the Filipino people’s human rights and welfare. She currently resides in Little Manila Queens.
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