Jam Pascual, Marikina City 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.



Three Poems


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.