ESL or You Weren't Here. Aldrin Valdez

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ESL or YOU WEREN’T HERE

      NIGHTBOAT BOOKS

      NEW YORK

      Copyright © 2018 by Aldrin Valdez

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States

      Print ISBN 978-1-937658-86-1

      Ebook ISBN 978-1-64362-065-7

      Design and typesetting by Margaret Tedesco

      Text set in Officina Sans and Sabon

      Cover images by Aldrin Valdez

      Front, Inside Space (To Jax), 2012, (detail) mixed-media on paper

      Back, Inside Space (Child), 2014, (detail) mixed-media on paper

      Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress

      Nightboat Books

      New York

       www.nightboat.org

       To Regina Feliciano Valdez

      CONTENTS

       ISA

       Tagalog

       Blue Bakla

       The Albularyo

       During a brownout

       Photograph Curling

       DALAWA

       Crossing

       November

       fall / pall

       ESL or You Weren’t Here

       dear aldrin rey

       Mrs. B Tells My Mother I Must Speak Only English at Home

       Long Distance Images

       Her hand

       TATLO

       Purple Gender

       The ancestral sense of HOLD is preserved in BEHOLD: “to keep, to tend, to watch over” / see: HAPTIC / see: “a place of refuge” / see: where?

       Divination with utensils

       P / Ph / F

       Photograph

       Opened

       Memory

       BUMIGAY

       Wearing a skirt on a Sunday afternoon

       Faggot Phonetics

       Sagad

       SHUFFLED SLIDES OF A CHANGING PAINTING

ISA

       Tagalog

      Nanay once joked that when it came time to move to the U.S.

      she’d beg the pilot to turn back. Or she’d jump out of the plane

      swim back to Manila.

       Come back

      I pray

       langoy

       langoy

      langoy ka.

      Swim with the river.

      Sa ilog.

      Taga ilog.

      From the river.

      Tagalog: People of the River.

      Nanay

      emerges from the water, cursing

      the trash and tae floating all around her, clinging to her ill-fitting dress, something she’d only ever wear to who knows—maybe an embassy, to a stuffy plane full of ‘kanos & balikbayans-to-be.

      She twists her hair dry, a gesture her arms have memorized wringing wet fabric ten times as thick down the street from her house where neighbors gossiped over laundry.

      She thinks to get on a jeepney, but she doesn’t want to stink up the whole bus with the shitty water drying on her skin and clothes.

       PUÑETA!

       LECHE!

      Tagalog curses feel good on her tongue.

      She spits on the earth & begins to walk the many, many miles back to Tondo. She is used to walking.

      The skin on her callused heels is a map of broken streets & syllables that fall like rain water on newly paved asphalt