Noreen Ocampo is a Filipino American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her collection Not Flowers won the 2021 Variant Lit Microchap Contest, and her work also appears in Palette Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, and Sundog Lit, among others. She holds a BA in English from Emory University and currently studies poetry in the MFA program at The University of Mississippi, where she is working to document and elevate stories of Filipino Americans in the Deep South.
There are no Filipinos in Mississippi
JACKSON AVENUE WEST
but when there are, we’re crowding the sidewalk at the impossible intersection, all six of us— well, the five of them and the one of me, watching from a hazy window of the Blue West screeching to a stop. I know the cars here are relentless and unyielding. The guts of the pedestrian button spill out from the pole. The five Filipinos glance at each other, their faces like my face searching, weeks before, for a kind pair of eyes in the cold. Their hands know there’s one way to cross. They reach for each other’s fingers, their wrists and sleeves, readying to move as one. I watch them flood the crosswalk, this impenetrable body cresting to full speed.
There are no Filipinos in Mississippi
ASIAN FOODS MARKET & RESTAURANT, TUPELO
no one to buy the mango Magnolia ice cream for $14.99 no one to pause and complain, What? Isn’t this the Magnolia State? no one to provide a price comparison to Seafood City or Manila Mart no one to brainstorm what exactly the gold label claims to mean no one to prop open the glass door and shiver beneath the weight no one to contemplate the severity of third-degree freezer burn no one to hover fingertips over the crystalized ice and press deep no one who knows how the mangoes survive this lonely cold
There are no Filipinos in Mississippi
PRICE STREET & after Jericho Brown
so the man on the bus asks, Why’re you here?
On the bus, with the man, I’m here,
but my body lurches into the window.
A heavy boot hits the gas. The hard window
cradles my head. Outside, the branches tremble.
The man cocks his head. My hands tremble.
In the South, winter comes out of nowhere.
I know the South. The man comes out of nowhere,
salivating for the islands: Where were you born?
Salivating for the islands, I wasn’t born
anywhere too far from the magnolias.
All too far from the magnolias,
there are no Filipinos in Mississippi.