Poetry by Angela Gabrielle Fabunan

                 Jo Guldi CC



​Mirror’s Water

I am the reflection of my mother in the stagnant water.
Who said I am my mother? Me. But I am not her.
I could never be her reflection: 
I am the water. 

I had a dream about a wedding. All that they ever
told me was that I would never go anywhere.
That I was too infatuated with gold, 
that I was not good. 

In my dream, I was walking down the aisle.
But the prince was absent. 

Who needs a prince when a woman can rescue
herself from the wedding, eat the cake,
run off with the dowry. 

There is a pain in my heart that is not the pain
in her heart. Useless to compare really,
there is her pain, and there is mine.

What is mine is not hers. 
She is not even my mother.

My mother, the perfect picture of a fifties wife,
always swept something under the vacuum cleaner,
would do laundry by hand, and would not
make a fuss, she’d do it for me. 

She loved me.
And I her. 

When the betrayal happened, I was young. 
She spun the story like Rapunzel. 

I was forevermore wary 
of women like her, taking shape, taking
my form in front of my eyes and convoluting it.

They’d dress me up as their favorite dummy,
and they’d exact their revenge of their very own
voodoo doll.

It wasn’t by coincidence that my mothers all look alike. 
They all stare at me with that sad look
of pity. As if they knew, as if they always
knew, that I have always known
them for who they are. 

For they are who they are: women
like me. We women who get caught up
in stories of each other, then prick blood
from each other’s webbed fingers in search
of the prince.

You who do not believe in stories, not even 
in mine, you who would like to believe evil 
is still in the grey, tell me what happened
with my guts, my blood, and my glory?

I think, you would say softly, if you were here,
it has turned into a soiled wedding dress 
you don’t deserve to bear.

In the dream, the wedding dress evaporates into a million
dark mouths to kiss my everlasting dream
to be something like a mother. 

Hollow and hallowed, the dream in the shape of a mother. 

Forget the princely counterpart, you beg of me, the one 
that was only ever sometimes mine.

It is me, in the mirror, smiling sinisterly at me. You, 
there, in the mirror, tell me what I did wrong.
                                                            Everything.
My mother, the first abandonment,
has shiny curls she could still twist in my back.

The loss, our loss, a displacement and a cavity.

My mother and me, in the mirror staring back
with something I am trying to unravel myself:

I was born formless but of form, my origin
is my beginning to transform, but every 
cupped water is the water molding itself
to my hands. Shift the form, and I shift
the water. Shift the water, and I 
change form.
​


​
Iha

We were made from the banana tree,
look at your palms, iha,
you who’ve grown in this city of eyes
like the pineapple, feel
what it feels to be alive,
peeling fruits for every ounce of juice
you have in you,
how it will never satisfy, or be satisfied,
or how a plant like you needs water only
as much as they have, 
not more, not less, but an empty sky
held up by your sewing, by your tending
the garden with care,
who taught you how to dance like that,
who taught you to impress
with a tambourine, your aunt Judalyn’s
time on the stage about to be over, 
and soon, you will rise
like the dough with which we make
bread that will never go stale,
have no fear, under the guidance of the Maestro,
your fate will be sealed.

​

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan was born in the Philippines but grew up in New York City. Her first book, The Sea That Beckoned, was published by Platypus Press in 2019, and her second book, Young Enough to Play, is forthcoming from UP Press in 2021. Her poems have been published extensively in Asia, the UK, and the US. She lives back and forth Manila, Olongapo City and New York. One day, she might settle somewhere once she ends the search for a home. Her website is agfabunan.journoportfolio.com.

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