all of the oceans were once one.
your tears were once a Philippine typhoon,
water that suffocated nurseries and cemeteries alike,
a torrent trying desperately to reclaim
eight thousand islands
back to her hands.
the waterfalls in our country — your country — roar
in a language you never taught me.
and yet, that salt water still squeezes through my veins,
locked behind my aching ribcage
where my heart beats faster and faster still.
all of the oceans were once one,
and my water was once yours,
but i struggle to reconcile the frigid lake i nearly drowned myself in
with the warm broth on our dinner table, poured onto steaming white rice.
when drowned bodies are pulled ashore they are indistinguishable from any old corpse,
recognizable only by loved ones,
the beloved ones who have memorized
every crease, every fold that once held the body together.
often it is the mother who is called in to identify the body.
we make it her job to see behind
swollen skin
decomposed cells
atrophied limbs
bruised body, abused body
peel back the flesh to find the fruit of her womb.
how would my body look during the autopsy? i wonder.
i imagine my spent body on an operating table.
i imagine the doctors cutting open the body created by you
(and mutilated by me),
(is this a boy or a girl? they ask),
and i want to ask them, what secrets have you found?
did you see something i didn’t?
maybe blood is still flowing through my heart’s burst chambers,
grains of salty sand behind the whites of my eyes,
a ocean churning in my ophthalmic vein,
a continental shelf lodged beneath my fingernails.
it’s hard to imagine they’d find anything that you don’t already know.
please, mother, take me home after the autopsy.
take me back in, dry me off,
say grace over my body,
take me back before the times when white priests spilled water on our bodies and called us catholic,
before the great oceans splintered your country — our country — into eight thousand pieces.
please, take me back, to the waters of your womb,
to the pitch-black amniotic sac where i was neither boy nor girl,
son nor daughter,
didn’t know inside from outside,
when your blood was mine, and my body was yours.
please, take me back,
before the ocean opened between you and i
before rivers ran from your cheeks as you held me
and begged me not to drown myself.
please, take me back,
and this time i won’t make you cry so often,
i will wash off well,
we will water the flowers,
and we will learn to swim.