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Feasting

By Joseph O. Legaspi

Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines

Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass
onto a bamboo table on the side of an island

road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight,
then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into

the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious
wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children

and younger women, buzzing with a rising
gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself

with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy,
sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face

when offered the yellow flesh like thickened
petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed

at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo
halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting.

His tongue tingled ripely. This country’s foreign
to me, he continued, but I’m not foreign to it.

Poet Bio

Poet Joseph Legaspi was born and raised in the Philippines; his family immigrated to Los Angeles when he was 12. He earned a BA at Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from New York University. Legaspi’s collections of poetry include Threshold, Imago, which won a Global Filipino Literary Award, and the chapbook Subways. With Sarah Gambito, Legaspi cofounded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that promotes and serves Asian American writers and writing. Legaspi lives and works in New York City.

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A Desert Memory

By Bertrand N. O. Walker

Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark'ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o'er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.

 

Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav'ler in their spell,

 

Weave ‘round him incantations,
Brewed and bro't forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And trembling quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?

 

The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
         The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
         In the purpling haze uplifted.

 

And down the steep trail, as he lists,
         He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
         From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.

 

Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow's depths we grope?

 

'Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
'Tis the Hopi's song of prayer,

 

That in darkness wards off danger,
When 'tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.

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