The sagittarius
A storm broke
waves / winds / wars parted
An idea was born
in a womb that was
also a golden cage
Who knows the color of ideas that never had
a first name?
The idea cracked open into 7,000 shell
pieces One flew on Delta wings
to a city with an apple for a heart
and trains for veins
The idea grew fat on corner shawarma
checked looked at me the wrong way attitudes
with gold block heavy Timbs
You’d think this idea had B.D.S.
Big
Dick
Swagger
Better yet
Let’s call this idea
Baklang
Dalagang
Suprema1
1Baklang: adj. Gay
Dalagang: adj. Young Woman
Suprema: n. Feminized form of Supremo, title used by the head of the Katipunan, a.k.a. Kataas-taasan Kagalang-
galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (literally translates in Tagalog to “Supreme and Most High Society of the
Children of the Nation”). Founded on July 7, 1892, the Katipunan was the secret society that rose out of the anti-
Spanish propaganda movement and characterized by the call for revolution. The time for reformation was over with
the Katipunan’s birth. Its first Supremo was a Sagittarius.
A song of monsoon and blood lava
In the mornings they say the duwendes scatter and descend thence they came
Daytime promises to be safe for bayan-people
The taga-bayan do not have diablos to fear, save
for the manufactured kind propagandized by the colonizers
They say prophecies fall from open mouths of angels
henceforth we dream in one language para magdilang anghel
The kings of five genders will return, once they emerge from The ulterior wombs of bastard saints
The pagbabalik that was prophecied on the wind
it yowls
tenses muscles
plunges a dagger into the salot of
five hundred years of servitude
(the plague felt like a clot in every artery that contained Indio blood)
All the histories converge upon this single promise
[NOW SING IN CHORUS OUR KALAYAAN]We will be free
We will be one
! Isang bagsak !
Verily
We pronounce all futures one with ancestral lineage that crackles and sizzles in fire
Whatever restless obsession has possessed your mind
before, your time to fuck and lick and mouth your
scream of self into the world
is now
This is your contract with The-Divine
Born in the Philippines and sharpened to a fine Tagalugan steel in Queens, Pamela Kristine Santos is a writer and multidisciplinary artist in the whitest city of America. Pamela co-founded the Winter Poetry Festival and the Bitter Melon collective in Portland, OR. Her curatorial work includes Sari Not Sari, an ongoing installation series of Filipinx diaspora artists in conversation with each other. Her poems have been published in Newtown Literary, Stoked Words anthology (Capturing Fire Press), and Unchaste Anthology Volume 2.
“The Sagittarius” has been previously published in Stoked Words: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from the Capturing Fire Slam & Summit (Capturing Fire Press, 2018).
BACK TO ISSUE