The sidewalk blooms with a thousand golden stingrays
darting towards every occupiable sea—
no, it’s just the leaves of the gingkoes flattening themselves;
the pavement a wax-paper album of pressings. In this place,

the rare heavy blanket of rain pulls everything down: leaves,
shutters, hoods, cold. This is my second autumn in this state, this storm
anomalous with the gold and orange of fall. Everything is wet; carved
gourds on porches dial back into waxy mush, the city’s shallow and calculated

gutters begin to serve a purpose. Softening corners of lawn
signs screaming you are welcome here curl inwards, their versions
of history stabbed into the waterlogged yards
like a warning: This is your home now. Be comfortable

here, or else. They’re right; this now is the closest I’ve felt
to being home in so long—the slow give of moist leaves
underfoot, a small tune of rot making itself
audible in the margins of this suburbia, the promise of winter

distant. Insects emerge out of the mud, glossy carapaces
stark and alien in the taxonomy of this new world.
But don’t let this fool you: this is a parched land still, even
with the twinned lakes bracketing the isthmus like a mouthguard,

holding the city’s uniform teeth back from biting
its own browning tongue. From the center of the town,
this could all pass for an island, the sun rising from water
and falling back into it. If I close my eyes and breathe in

I could be on any other street back in Quezon City,
its lopsided culverts swollen with fruit turning brown then black then
finally a moldy white. The brittle fences sigh, everything damp like lips
of envelopes to another body in another country. I turn

the corner and step into a puddle that isn’t blood. Again, that
familiar air of decomposition. An invisible bridge you’re willing
to follow and cross because you’re dying to live
and die in their spoil of milk and honey.