Jam Pascual was a fellow for poetry at the 15th Iyas National Writers’ Workshop and the 56th Silliman University National Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Rambutan Literary. He is currently working on his first full-length collection. Nearly every magazine he has written for has died.
Isaac Prepares to Sacrifice Abraham
There is no incentive for another prayer. It could well be a ram ensnared in a provident thicket waits. The stories that come after us will bind me as well— to truth, or a promise, or to a power that is not mine. Let us take our time in our walk up the mountain. The dialect of the wind at this altitude wears different shapes and pitches. Trembling pebbles register our steps. I have never seen an angel. I want to make you laugh. It breaks my heart to see you tired. I look at your hands, the same ones that have instructed me on how to plunge a good blade into good meat, like so, like so, hanging slack, unoccupied by ritual. To spend time like this. This is a faithful body. I expect bone and sinew to cooperate, and it does. I have known you for as long as you have known me. The sky is not a mirror. The earth is not a mirror. I avert my eyes from your eyes. This is the only way I know how to be brave. Thank you for everything. I have to be the one who obeys.
Holy Week, and the Roads Are So Empty That Going Fast is Easy
April 2, 2021
and sometimes what will happen is that when someone decides they are finished with the undertaking of being in your life, they will make this decision privately, with relief, not to hurt you, though they do not consult you; this decision does not take you quietly aside, and you will need to know that this is not abandonment; abandonment is for silos standing in flaxen fields, fake lighthouses in a row, and you will need to know that this is all windswept and fine; if a personality is the same as a soul then nothing has died, and there might come a day when you will encounter each other again after years through a chain of small usherings, revisions of the same volta, and their name is a lap to run, but you want to say their name anyway, and you won’t, and this is a decision you also make without consulting them, and even this is alright; you come into a clearing, and a pledge stands inert in the field of knowing
When I Knock My Front Teeth On the Mic, I Finally Understand
That God put me on this earth to scream. Good and guttural. Hellion chip enamel off atonally. The taste of beer and iron. Gold is the absolute fury of every engineered exhale. Clattering cymbal and quivering steel tripwire woven through cedar menace whip around on a whim like a twister. The devil can’t come in today. He called in sick, I forged his medical excuse. A cleansing is commencing. Forego all Apollonian affectation and bless this metal mess. And do you know what bliss it is. To throttle like a body should. I’ve rallied black lung to pull the primordial from all these long years to make this night worth the good people’s money. There ain’t no fucking pivot, we are here for a good time, for the sheer brawn of being alive. This is for the gutter punks with all the damage, the single mothers, the bushwhacking philosophers, the runaways from a country called knowing everything. Brute release. The sacred technique.