POETRY
By LAWDENMARC DECAMORA
Most of the panic remains virginal in the backyard, mostly quince-coloured, growing
like a flower sitting on an acre of phrases, mostly gerund, echoing
the voiced Gustav Klimt canvas that speculates on a mottled shadow,
the figure of it the sharp side of human
the freckled face of suspicion
entering the green steel fences of our house, near the grass
that beds the pain, the pity, the first person
with a complex set of subjunctive mood. At about ten in the morning,
before lunch is served, short of parenthetical immensities
about the recent case of a dog, the doomed offering beneath the orange sun,
the children surround the area
where there is a smell drawing a familiar incident,
a funny fruit torn from the sight’s memorial Eden
to recall a life in the hay, once mistakenly
begging for bones, sometimes barking at the neighbour’s
election campaign ads-plastered tree,
shaking out what’s coming in less, drily unnameable.
However, in the interest of ungrammatical bodies writhing into a tiny talented form,
a secret snapping in, then momentarily a scintillant revelation:
the children should know—
the fleshy ground entails to stain and swell the inside
that is the given pronoun, the only thing escaping existence
for a dead goat, now slurping reciprocally red,
to sink the unknowing world in the deadest drink of panic. And that a stranger
from out of nowhere, appears, to finally recognize the goat, mistaken for a dog,
as open flesh of an undetermined time and space, as syntax
the rain accidentally builds.
Lawdenmarc Decamora is a graduate student of literary and cultural studies at the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU). He holds an MFA in creative writing and has been a fellow of prestigious regional and national creative writing and criticism workshops in the Philippines, among them include Faigao, Lamiraw, Pamiyabe, Iligan, and KRITIKA. His literary works were published in Mad Swirl (Texas), TAYO Literary Magazine (San Francisco), WE ARE A WEBSITE Literary & Art Journal (Singapore), Cruising Magazine of Manila Bulletin, To Voice My Own (Proceedings of the 21st Iligan National Writers Workshop), Paper Monster Press, and BUKAMBIBIG Issue One: “Crowds”. He also has presented papers in international and national conferences. He is currently a faculty member of University of Santo Tomas (UST) and a research fellow of the university’s Research Centre for Culture, Arts and Humanities (RCCAH).
